2007 was an immensely important year for UBS; our 150th anniversary. It is such a long time since a group of philanthropists, which included Charles Dickens, founded UBS. For so many decades our charity remained underdeveloped through lack of resource and a severely limited profile.
However, we have chose to celebrate our anniversary by launching a new strategic plan.We make a lifelong commitment to every beneficiary in the UBS family and support them with vital support, through social inclusion and friendship, as well as financially. We provide a range of services including; befriending schemes through community volunteers; a regular income; grants in emergencies; thermal slippers, bedding and warm clothing to fight hypothermia; newsletters; food hampers at Christmas; and social events in areas where we have staff.
Central to all our objectives is our mission to combat isolation and poverty amongst older people. Sadly, 94% of our current beneficiaries live alone and they all live below the UK poverty line. Research has shown just how damaging loneliness can be in particular. A Help the Aged report on social isolation showed that 1.6 million older people do not have weekly contact with anyone.
Our support reduces financial insecurity and loneliness, whilst enabling people to remain independent. We have developed a range of eight voluntary roles so people can support our beneficiaries directly by becoming telephone befrienders, home visitors, drivers or knitters for example. Also, they can support our fundraising activities by participating in street collections or helping at events that we host during the year.
We know there are many more older people needing our help and it has never been as essential as it is now for us to attract more levels of support from new donors. Since 2007 the limits on our reserves approached a critical stage, which was compounded by the economic climate of 2008-09. It has never been as essential as it is now for us to attract support from new donors so that we will be able to help more older people.
We continue to research the needs of those older people who are asking for our help, along with surveying the opinions of our existing beneficiaries so that our future service delivery is as appropriate and efficient as possible. In addition, we are constantly devising new ways of meeting older people’s needs through services that are financially viable.
We have been fortunate to have enlisted the support of several volunteers who have helped support the research of our staff. We have the generous assistance of Hazel Ind and Karen Douglas at Head Office who kindly produce the quarterly beneficiary newsletter, which can be downloaded from the link below, along with the results of our formal beneficiary survey conducted by UBS and its partner charity IndependentAge in May 2008. Such tools are essential to us discovering more information about the needs and desires of the older people we help.
Beneficiary Newsletter, May 2008
Part 1 Results of the National Beneficiary Survey 2008
Part 2 Results of the National Beneficiary Survey 2008
Another example of our research can be seen through our volunteer on Merseyside, Jennie Gorman. She is a Human Geography and History undergraduate from the Faculty of Social Sciences at John Moore’s University in Liverpool. In 2007 she was responsible for conducting a targeted beneficiary survey, which she developed in conjunction with UBS’ staff in Head Office. It investigating the specific needs of waiting list’s of applicants we had at that time, who were in need of financial support from UBS.
Jennie’s continuing work with UBS will us produce a set of proposals for our future strategy of service delivery that will take shape in 2008.The results and analysis of this initial beneficiary waiting list survey can be viewed by clicking on the link below…
Waiting List Beneficiary Survey, November 2007
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