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2020-07-31-accounts

Chairs report 2020

It is my pleasure to attempt to summarise what has been a very busy year for YPCS. Young People’s Counselling Service has been in existence since 1984 and exists to provide counselling services to young people aged 11-18 in the Yaxley, Whittlesey and Fenland areas.

Before I summarise our main achievements this year, I must first thank our hard working trustees who devote a huge amount of time and energy to their roles and without them we wouldn’t have made the progress we have made in the last few years. On a personal level I would like to say that our current team is a pleasure to work with and without their enthusiasm and passion to help young people we wouldn’t have achieved what we have. Nor would we have such fantastic plans for development over the next 12-24 months.

I think I will start with the impact of coronavirus as it has illustrated not only how this has affected society and its mental health, but also in our response, we have shown the best of ourselves as a charity. We could have mothballed everything, stayed safe, hidden away and not pressed ahead with our most recent appointment-Thelma our Business Development Manager. That moment passed briefly when we realised that this presented us with both opportunities as well as challenges. The need was greater than ever and innovation was required to re-engineer the support we offered. To embrace this new environment required flexibility and a growth mentality. We have been praised for our agility and the positive way we have approached the current lockdown. The need is greater than ever as we have seen a massive increase in mental health issues. In a weekend I wrote and implemented an emergency response document and our therapists adjusted to working online as the lockdown took hold. We have been well positioned to seek out some of the Covid-related funding and best of all we have continued to support young people and families who need us more than ever.

Income is up and thank you to David and Peter for preparing the accounts and to Maisie for her expert advice. Please see his report for details. I think we are all aware that the amount of work relating to our finances is expanding in volume and complexity. This is a crucial area for development in the coming months as it is now too much for our current way of working. It was one of the highlights of the year when we won first prize in the Persimmon ‘Building Futures’ awards and received £100,000.The bank balance was boosted significantly by the prize and also now receives a regular income from the school contracts we have secured. The Persimmon money has allowed us to be bold and take on a Business Development Manager in order to evolve the charity to the next level.

We applied in May 2019 to change the structure of YPCS to a CIO. This was recommended to us by experts in the field as it protected the trustees and allowed the charity to set up a trading arm and boost its income from activity there. Almost 12 months later we seem no nearer achieving this. I hope to have more positive news soon.

We have been able to help even more children with 1:1 counselling and play therapy this year, see the clinical report for details. We were also delighted to secure a prestigious Children in Need grant that has enabled us to increase our upper age range from 16 to 18. This was worth almost £30,000 over 3 years and was secured after a high-quality application. Our aim is to expand our lower age range to 9 as soon as we are able.

Our first Annabelle Davis Centre (ADC) in Yaxley has successfully running for over 12 months now. It opened slowly and without fanfare although we planned a more public opening in early summer 2020 but this has fallen victim to the lockdown. Yaxley is where most of our therapy out

of schools happens with a little happening in Ramsey. Supervision of the make over by Persimmons and the fitting out of the centre to make it a comfortable and welcoming space was a massive and stressful project overseen largely by Michelle. I would like to congratulate her on a magnificent achievement not only with regards to the aesthetics and functionality but in ensuring that all the unseen necessities such as fire policies were in place. The ADC Yaxley has also become our YPCS base and Michelle has done a fabulous job in setting up offices there. The garden is also slowly taking shape.

Our second ADC in Wisbech was developed during the last year thanks to a huge amount of work by Nicola. It will offer a different kind of experience to the bungalow in Yaxley and Nicola has secured an architect and builders so the project should be realised at almost nil cost. It will be a much-needed facility in a town of high deprivation and intense need. It is currently ‘furloughed’ like much of the country and we are hoping that the support remains after the lockdown ends.

We have developed our clinical offer by recruiting new therapists and working with schools. Nicky retires this academic year and is able to offer us more time as a result. Her insights into the challenges in schools is of great help and we wish her all the best in this new chapter in her life. Michelle has done a wonderful job supervising and supporting the therapists and we now have contracts in 3 secondary schools and 2 places of further education (UCP and UTC). We have reduced our waiting list from a peak of over 60 and 18 weeks wait to a low of under 20 and 6 weeks wait (at its best). It is our over-arching ambition to keep waiting times down as low as possible with a long-term aim of being able to issue an appointment at the point of referral. Safeguarding is a vital component of our work and we are expertly led in this by Claire who has skilfully steered us through a number of complex and challenging cases. The clinical team collectively manage a lot of risk and it is a huge professional support to us all that Claire is so experienced in this area.

We have participated in many projects this year some of which are listed below:

Our fund-raising highlights included a highly successful golf day hosted by one of our patrons Warwick Davis and a summer of Sunday fund raising at Charters. We were invited again to the Peterborough Slimming World Ball and were chosen by Kings School to be their charity of the year. It is not possible to name every fund-raising event and our support comes from local pubs, shops, residents and of course our yellow pots which are everywhere! We continue to be supported by local businesses such as Athene, BGL and RSI and are grateful for their support both in financial terms but also in providing people for events and professional advice in HR and legal areas.

Our patrons have been hugely supportive over the year despite some significant personal challenges and Annabelle is producing some artwork for ADC Yaxley as well as being involved in our Youth Ambassador Programme. Our ambition is for YPCS to be led by young people but supported by professionals.

We also said goodbye early in 2020 to Leigh who had worked with YPCS for over 4 years as our administrator. Increased hours for her main job and growth in the charity meant that she could no longer commit to the time we needed. I would like to take this opportunity to thank her for her input and she has agreed to remain in touch as our YPCS representative in Whittlesey where she lives.

Our commitment to quality has been recognised and we are now officially on the NHS/CCG list of service providers for our local area and have been asked to get involved in the consultation process for service development in the coming years. Our strong clinical team of Clare, Michelle and myself is unique in local charities and we have started the journey to getting our services commissioned by the CCG as we identified that we are the only service offering Tier 3 services to young people who still don’t meet CAMH threshold. We have looked at extending our clinical offer and have provided training in TRE (Total Release Experience) to one of our therapists and a client of hers with great success. In a project with Cambridgeshire police we hope to consolidate the technique and offer it more widely.

We have had 3 trustees leave and one arrive during 2019. David our Treasurer, has successfully got us Gift Aid and has embraced the new challenges of 2 new employees. Remi joined us a few months ago and has invested a huge amount of time setting up our new IT system Charity Log and putting us in good stead for tracking clients and collating data. Thelma joined us in April and brings with her a huge amount of experience in the charity sector. In her early mapping of our current activity and plans she has unearthed a massive amount of activity and achievements that has stunned us in its size. What a lot we have collectively achieved. We have even more to be proud of that we realised. Our development continues at pace and when you look back at what we looked like 3-4 years ago we are unrecognisable and as your Chair I am very proud of what we have collectively achieved.

Overall, another fabulous year and many successes, however there is always much to develop further. I remain passionate about the work we are doing and our plans to help more young people and their families, to focus on early intervention, widen our clinical offer, expand the age range we can help and continue to respond professionally to all the challenges ahead.

Alison Graham Chair

(Annual report for 2020)