Report and Accounts

Chief Executives statement 2008 / 2009

It is always nice to write the Chief Executives statement when we have reported a surplus for the year. However, to borrow a phrase from football journalism, this year was a year of two halves.

These twelve months have thrown up a number of issues for the management, staff and volunteers to deal with. April 2008 began with an optimistic view of our efforts. Our training division was experiencing strong demand for our training days. Our CBT course was proving particularly popular with counsellors seeking further development of their skills in this geographical area. Our balance between low cost and full fee paying clients was proving steady and fund raising was up.

Late summer and autumn brought some unsettling times as the economic climate changed. We began to experience an increased demand for low cost counselling without a noticeable increase in full fee clients. This challenge was met by rolling out our bursary scheme, which allowed us to counsel people in financial hardship at a nominal charge to them without loosing the integrity of our normal fee structure. We also recruited seven new counsellors to fill traditionally quiet daytime slots. We achieved this without much financial cost to the charity thereby availing of economies of scale. Demand for our training courses remained strong and we continued to fund raise for our bursary scheme through half marathons and a successful raffle at the Wokingham Winter Carnival. This was a good fun event and helped bring the face of counselling to the community.

During this period we provided approximately 3000 sessions to people in the community. Approximately 70% of our clients come from a five mile radius of Wokingham Town centre, 20% travel from Woodley and Earley and the remainder from further afield.

The impact to the IAPT thus far has been minimal; however the service is not yet fully operational in this area. We continue to monitor any changes with a view to providing any ancillary assistance to the service when it becomes operational.

Changes to the registration of counsellors and methods of working are under review through the HPC (Healthcare Professionals Council) and could impact on how we operate as a service. Further information will be available over the coming financial year and we are represented at the table through our membership of WPF Therapy.

Finally, I would like to thank our growing band of dedicated volunteers for their herculean efforts over this past year, without their commitment and belief in the counselling process many people would not have had access to help or the possibility for a brighter future.  Thank you all.

 

Declan Farrell MA (counselling) MBACP

CEO