## BREAST MATES CANCER SUPPORT GROUP Registered Charity no. 1171678 Patron Noreen Kershaw Trustees’ Annual Report 1[st] January- 31[st] December 2020 ## Charity’s Principal Address 40 Eccleston Street Prescot L34 5QJ Contact – 07835 982879 or 07835 981576 Email: contact@breastmates.org Website: www.breastmates.org Due to the Covid pandemic the Annual General Meeting for 2020 was cancelled. A letter was sent to all our members and the trustees below were elected at our zoom meeting on 13[th] August 2020. Sue Coventry Anne Chell Clare Ducker Eileen McGovern Julie Morgan Donna Sanders Debbie Watson ## BREAST MATES LEGAL STRUCTURE AND GOVERNANCE The charity is governed by its Constitution, which will be reviewed annually and revised, if necessary, in line with the Charity Commission’s guidance and approval. The charity is incorporated through legal status of a Charitable Incorporated Organisation (CIO), which means that if the CIO is wound up, the trustees of the CIO have no liability to contribute to its assets and no personal responsibility for settling its debts and liabilities. No serious incident or other matter that trustees need to report to the charity commission has occurred during this reporting period. The charity will continue to purchase Public Liability insurance. At every annual general meeting one third of the charity trustees shall retire from office. The vacancies arising may be filled by the decision of the members at the annual general meeting. If the vacancies are not filled the trustees may at any time decide to appoint a new charity trustee. The charity is administered by a committee of up to nine trustees, who meet monthly. ## OBJECTS OF THE CHARITY AS SET OUT IN THE CONSTITUTION The relief of persons suffering from breast cancer and to further advance the education of the public on the subject of breast cancer. 1 ## BREAST MATES Breast Mates Cancer Support Group offers support, information and friendship to people diagnosed with breast cancer in Knowsley and the surrounding area. We currently lease an office from Al’s Arc, a local Community Interest Company based at 40 Eccleston Street, Prescot L34 5QJ. We hold our monthly support group meetings in their activities space on the ground floor. We are a non-medical self-help group run by local people. At present all bar one of the trustees have had breast cancer - all are volunteers with the group. A breast cancer diagnosis can lead to people feeling very alone; meeting with others who are going through a similar experience and sharing information can really help. ## PRINCIPAL ACTIVITIES Breast Mates offers practical and emotional support, information, a telephone help-line, social and group activities, exercise classes and works in the local community raising the awareness of breast cancer and breast screening. ## PRINCIPAL SOURCE OF FUNDS Due to the COVID pandemic, 2020 has been a very challenging year for most charities. Breast Mates were fortunate to have had a very good year regarding donations and fundraising in 2019 and this allowed us to spend our time supporting members rather than applying for grants and fundraising. We did obtain small COVID Grants from Tesco and the Co-op and also a small Community Grant from our local Asda in Huyton Village. The Mayor of Knowsley’s Charity kindly gave us a £2,000 donation which, added to private donations, left us with only a small shortfall of income over expenditure. 2 Our cash reserves have been untouched and remain at £9000.00 We hold cash reserves in order to protect the charity’s activities from future variations in its income streams. We will review these reserves annually. ## OUR MAIN ACHIEVEMENTS DURING 2020 January saw us settling into our new office in Prescot. It is so good to have a permanent base. Volunteers held a forward planning meeting and had a programme of events mapped out for 2020. The first being a lovely afternoon tea and make-up demonstration from Charlotte Tilbury staff, who work at John Lewis. Then in February we had a great 80’s fundraising evening organised by Hannah Massey. Breast Mates continued to work with the Breast Screening Programme on our “It Only Takes a Minute” project, this time in Huyton. Our volunteers were out and about during January and February putting up banners and leaflets and talking to leaders of local community centres, hairdressers, beauty parlours etc. We hope that this work will increase the uptake in breast screening in Huyton too. Local GP’s had heard about our success in Kirkby and were keen for us to be involved in contacting and talking to their patients about the importance of breast screening. March came and we had to pause all our face-to-face activities due to the Covid 19 pandemic. Our volunteers sprang into action. We contacted all our members and offered emotional and practical support and we continued to support them by phone. We contacted health professionals if we were worried about our members’ health. We also put people in touch with benefit advisors at local hospitals and in the community. Volunteers applied for personal grants for members and accessed local organisations who were providing food hampers and delivered the hampers to our 3 members where needed. Volunteers also picked up prescriptions and helped with shopping. Volunteers very quickly learned how to access Zoom and with many thanks for Paul Lucock’s tutoring, we set up meetings for trustees and volunteers. We set up a variety of Zoom meetings for our members. These included: yoga, pilates, monthly support group meetings for our members with secondary breast cancer, guest speakers, quiz nights and bingo sessions. We accessed funding from Tesco and The Co-op Covid Grants to provide tablets for members so they could join our zoom meetings. Volunteers contacted medical professionals and arranged for them to speak at our zoom meetings. We would like to thank: Dr Rebecca Dobson, Consultant Cardiologist from Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital, Prof Carlo Palmieri, Consultant in Medical Oncology, Liverpool Royal and Clatterbridge Hospital, Jo Francis, Metastatic Breast Cancer Clinical Nurse Specialist, Liverpool Royal Hospital and Dr Helen Innes, Consultant in Medical Oncology, Clatterbridge and St Helens Hospitals, Miss Lena Chagla, Breast Unit Head, St Helens & Knowsley Hospitals. They gave very informative talks and offered great reassurance to our members during such a worrying time. A special thank you to Professor Mari Lloyd Williams, Chair of Palliative Care, University of Liverpool and Consultant at Marie Curie Hospice. Mari is a great supporter of Breast Mates and is always there to help us in any way she can. As the year progressed, volunteers made little gifts and designed personal cards with uplifting messages and sent or delivered them to all our members. These gifts were sent out every couple of months throughout 2020 and were greatly appreciated by our members. In July, when covid regulations allowed, we set up picnics in our local park in Prescot. Thanks to covid grants from Tesco and the Co-op we were able to buy picnic tables and chairs. The picnics 4 were a great success and carried on weekly until the weather stopped us. Breast Mates approached Paul Lucock to set up a website - many thanks to Paul for all his work on this. One of our aims for 2020 was to campaign for the appointment of a specialist secondary breast care nurse for St Helens Hospital. We spoke to Professor Carlo Palmeiri about this. Carlo was one of our guest speakers who chairs the budget committee at Clatterbridge and was in the process of asking for the appointment of extra secondary breast nurses. He asked us to write to the committee. Our member Carolyn Hanley wrote a brilliant first-hand account as to why such an appointment was needed. Two full time nurses were appointed by Clatterbridge to add to the one half time nurse in post on the Wirral. At the time of writing this report we are awaiting confirmation that these nurses will be allocated time at St Helens Hospital. A big thank you to Carolyn for ensuring that the patient’s voice was heard. We are sure that the input from Breast Mates helped. Breast Mates volunteers continued to accept new referrals and have offered much needed support and information to those newly diagnosed during the pandemic. A breast cancer diagnosis can lead to people feeling very alone; when you also have a pandemic, and have appointments paused and some planned treatments delayed or even stopped it can become overwhelming. All communication with medical staff was on the telephone. Family members and carers could not visit them in hospital or accompany them for chemotherapy treatments. The pandemic was a worrying time for all of us. For those with cancer it was a nightmare. During the autumn and winter months our volunteers took the opportunity to arrange for the refurbishment of our office kitchen, toilet area and the decoration of the hall, stairs and landing. 5 A big thank you to volunteer, Tracey Carmichael, who projectmanaged the work. Tracey contacted Steve Wiles who has S.A. Wiles Painting and Decorating Company. Steve’s wife Leanne was a very good friend of one of our lovely Breast Mates, Heidi Roberts. Steve went above and beyond what he was asked to do, asking tradesmen he knew to help us. Steve contacted Simon at Edgeway Heating Ltd, based in Wigan. Simon donated the vanity unit and w/c plus all the pipe work for both the toilet area and new kitchen and also did the installation at no cost. Steve also contacted Kevin at KBH Construction Ltd. Kevin does work for Howdens Kitchen Manufacturers and asked us to send our Annual Report to Mark Lowrey the Depot Manager. This resulted in Howdens donating the kitchen and KBH installing it at no cost. A chair lift was installed thanks to a donation from the Mayor of Knowsley’s Charity. We now have a lovely, welcoming, accessible space into which to invite our members. How fortunate we are to have such wonderful support. We were totally overwhelmed by such generosity. In early December our volunteers put together Christmas Goodie Bags and personally delivered them to over seventy members. Although we had been keeping in touch by telephone calls, on Zoom and on our WhatsApp group, it was lovely to have a little socially distanced chat on the doorstep. The year ended with the prospect of another lockdown. As we write this report we are still living in uncertain times. Breast Mates volunteers continue to work hard doing what we can to support those with a breast cancer diagnosis. We have plans to restart our meetings, exercise sessions, our breast screening project and our many social activities as soon as it is safe to do so. We are in the process of applying for grants for our Dance for Health, Walk and Talk sessions and for core funding. 6 Breast Mates would like to thank all the many organisations and individuals who supported us during this very difficult time. We are once again amazed at the generosity, kindness and goodwill of those who share their time, expertise, skills and energy supporting our cause. Trustees declare that they have approved the trustees’ report above. Signed Jackie Lucock **Breast Mates Secretary** 7 ## |||funds|||funds|Endowment
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