Written evidence submitted by Irish Community Services

IMPACT OF COVID 19 ON THE CHARITY SECTOR

STATEMENT OF EVIDENCE FROM IRISH COMMUNITY SERVICES.

Reg. Charity No.  1085033

Background and context

Irish Community Services (ICS) is a well-established charity that for over 25 years has addressed gaps in provision for health and well-being, social care, advocacy and the cultural needs of Irish communities in south London.

The charity was set up in 1984 by members of the local Irish Community as a statement of their rejection of the sectarian narrative which had found expression in the terrorist bombings in Woolwich. While mainly working with the first and second generation Irish it welcomes anyone from the area, young or old, who seek its help and has expanded beyond Greenwich into Lewisham and Bexley. 

ICS employs 6 part-time and 3 full time staff offering information, advice and support services to its constituency. Prior to the pandemic, and with the support of over 80 Volunteers,  it did this through the provision of 6 lunch clubs, operating weekly, and a number of services for the elderly, family carers (particularly those caring for relatives with dementia, cancer, Parkinson’s and other age related conditions), the infirm and housebound.  It also provides an advice and advocacy service for clients with employment, housing, benefits, pensions or debt management issues. It operates within the prison service and has good links with local councils and other service providers.

Our intervention improves health and well-being outcomes, tackles issues of health inequalities, deprivation, and discrimination, and improves access to services through culturally sensitive support. We work strategically - locally, regionally and nationally - ensuring the voice of our communities is heard in improving health and social care services.

Impact of Covid 19

Just before the formal advice from Government and PHE, we closed our 6 Lunch clubs and suspended meetings of all our support groups, face to face meetings at the office and home visits. We suspended the use of our premises by other groups that were using our facilities on a paying basis. 3 of our staff are in a high risk group so they have been working from home so far as they can. The remainder have continued to come into the office observing bio-security protocols and social distancing. To facilitate that we operate a rota to ensure core office hours are covered enabling clients and service users to maintain contact by phone and email. Our priority is to ensure no one slips through the net.

Inevitably, the services provided have been impacted. Support groups have moved to telephone and on-line contact and while advocacy and advice services have been sustained – albeit with a slower turnaround since we suspended home visits and face to face meetings.

The Lunch Clubs were more than just that. They provided an opportunity for many of our service users to get their only weekly outing, they enabled staff to monitor attendees health and personal circumstances, they provided a powerful means of combating social isolation, they encouraged and fostered a real community spirit where people made new friendships and found support during times of crisis, bereavement or ill-health. They provided a space where staff could, by simple observation, identify need and then enable the required service or support to be put in place – freed of the reluctance that often attaches to older people asking for help.

The impact of a significant part of our services was in combating social isolation, supporting people to live independently, and supporting family carers to enable elderly relatives to remain living with a family member. This pandemic has cut right across that work. However, a programme to call all of our service users weekly and those who are identified as particularly vulnerable (living alone, with existing serious health conditions, housebound) more frequently, has been implemented and is working well.

However, the success of remote working is constrained by IT limitations that have not been possible to update in previous years due to lack of funds for this sort of core cost. Case work has to be recorded and this is compromised when there is no access to office facilities.

We have had to arrange for three clients living alone to be hospitalized when it became obvious that their condition required it but they were not accessing their usual GP services. Access to databases is critical to support this sort of intervention.

We have re-deployed the staff supporting the lunch clubs to support the telephone contact programme and ensure that, if required, we can get food, medication and essential supplies to clients who are living alone and housebound or self-isolating.

Inevitably the funding we have for these workers will come under pressure since the work they normally support cannot be delivered and is unlikely to be re-instated until a vaccine has been found. The funding for these posts is potentially at risk when grant support for 2020/21 is announced by our major funder. If lost, it will be a huge challenge to get it re-instated or replaced.

We were never overly reliant on donations to operate, requiring more structured long term funding in order to put services in place that could be sustained with some confidence. We expect the funding that previously has supported the rest of our services and the organisation’s core costs to come under intense pressure or not be available because every community charity will now be chasing the same funding. This will have a huge impact on our viability as a charity if we cannot replace or secure a continuation of it.

We have not furloughed staff who cannot do their normal work since our posts are grant funded and it would be wrong to take tax payers money while this funding remains available to us.

Summary

The Covid 19 pandemic has required us to adopt new ways of working and be strict about limits to what we can do. We are maintaining communication with our service users and community through social media, email and telephone. We are less efficient as a team by not having all our workers together and historical funding pressures have meant that our communications and IT systems are not as modern as would now prove their worth.

We are likely to see funding curtailed or lost as we come out of this lockdown and we will either continue as a much reduced service or need to make a decision about our sustainability.

We expect demand for support from our traditional client base will remain constant but there will be new demands as the Corona virus impacts the security of employment, housing and relationships within our community where, until now, people expected and enjoyed relative stability. To be relevant and useful we will have to adapt rapidly and deliver results.

Patrick Burns

Chair of Trustees

15 April 2020.