2007 is an immensely important year for UBS; it is our 150^th 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 chosen 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. Due to the limits on our reserves, we have a waiting list of more than 100 people waiting to receive financial assistance from us. This is growing by the day as the public’s knowledge of our work continues to grow. 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.

In the meantime we are researching 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 Jennie Gorman, a Human Geography and History undergraduate from the Faculty of Social Sciences at John Moore’s University in Liverpool. She has been responsible for conducting a new beneficiary survey, which she developed in conjunction with UBS’ staff in Head Office. It has been targeted initially, at investigating the specific needs of our current waiting list’s applicants and will be developed further in future to include our existing beneficiaries.

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…