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2021-09-30-accounts

ANNUAL REPORT

2020 - 2021

Give us a blurb about Annual Report for period to 30 September 2021 a story on page 4. Charitable Incorporated Organisation – Registration No. 1192217 Country of Registration: England & Wales

Registered Office: 12A School Road, Newton Abbot, TQ12 2JU Trustee Board for reported period:

Barry Wadlan – Chair, John Leins, Donna Ridout and Linda Puryer Chief Executive – Lindie Whitfield Director of Resources – Emma Warren Bank: Lloyds Bank PLC

Financial Statement and Accounts prepared by: Barretts Chartered Accountants, 22 Union Street, Newton Abbot, TQ12 2JS and submitted within this report in accordance with Charity Commission requirements for small charities with income of less than £25k

| INTRODUCTION

Wellbeing in Action exist to remove and prevent the causes of harm to people’s physical, mental, financial, social and community health and wellbeing.

Our ethos is ‘if we can, we do’ and we use the power of practical social action to draw the community into a collaborative force to immediately bring relief to individuals and families whose wellbeing is suffering.

We join together as a equal members, in recognition that all people have times they need a little help, and all people have opportunities to extend a hand to others. We call this The Good Karma Club, and it is this transaction of equitable human kindness that restores balance, pride, joy, motivation and enables individuals to live their best lives on their own terms.

Structure, governance & management

The organisation is a charitable incorporated organisation, previously operating informally in the community prior to formal registration as a charity on 6[th] November 2020. All Trustees give their time voluntarily and receive no benefits from the charity.

The Trustees review the aims, objectives and activities of the charity each year. This report looks at what the charity has achieved and the outcomes of our work for the year ending 30 September 2021. The Trustees report the success of each key activity and the benefits the charity has brought to those groups of people that it is set up to help as a way to both celebrate our work and check we have not drifted from our intended purpose.

Trustees usually serve for a term of three years and may be re-appointed for a second term. As our first operating year as a registered charity, all original trustees remain and it is intended to grow our Board in the next year, which was difficult during the pandemic but will be a priority going forwards. In this initial year, trustees have liaised on a more frequent basis and have been provided online workshops and guidance manuals to increase their trustee capabilities. We have reduced risk during our first year by building strong working relationships with external professionals to provide guidance in matters such as HR, policy creation, legal advice and clinical supervision for the Chief Executive who is, herself, a volunteer but with long standing experience in the voluntary sector.

Much work in the early years is about building solid infrastructure, reviewing and refining our strategic approaches, carefully developing our service offer, and meeting each development with carefully thought out policy and risk management. Collaboration with partners within our community and sector has been invaluable and will continue.

OUR ACHIEVEMENTS BY OBJECTIVE AND SERVICE AREA:

Our first task as a charity was to create a three year plan, with clear and specific objectives and performance indicators. The plan contains elements about:

The trustees present Wellbeing in Action’s original plan as the terms of reference for the outcomes we are able to report within this annual review. The following is our submission of key achievements and future priorities:

  1. Strategic Development:

  2. a) As a very small, locally delivering charity, with very small income streams, the charity has regardless pitched above its weight in building strong foundations to ensure it has the platform to grow robustly. We have collaborated with experienced partners to create a suite of policies to protect our beneficiaries, delivery team and the charity. These include essential safeguarding, lone working practise, financial management protocols, health and safety, equality and diversity and working guidelines for volunteers, managing wellbeing in the workplace and additional enhanced policies for menopause and supporting people experiencing domestic abuse.

  3. b) We have had the benefit of the support of Mr C Wills of Scott Richard Solicitors to assist with navigating day to day legal issues – from mentoring over HR matters to legal guidance around building leases and as a muse for our CEO. This has been invaluable and led us to understand the importance of securing a legal trustee to our Board in our second operating year to come.

  4. c) We have implemented financial routines, opened official charity bank accounts and implemented a transparent and clear book keeping system, and our accountants have provided guidance as we have worked through the best methods to manage and record our financial handling. As a result we have immediately benefited from accurate and detailed analysis of our financial transactions and financial health and needs.

  5. d) The trustees have prioritised operational leadership by recruiting a Chief Officer to oversee day to day management of the charity and the service delivery areas. She is assisted by an equally dedicated voluntary Director of Resources, without whom the logistical and administrative functions that make the charity function would not be possible. These positions are currently on a voluntary basis and we are fortunate to have passionate and dedicated individuals who have the capacity to offer this unusual and considerable investment. We know prioritising an incremental remuneration for these posts during future years will considerably improve the charity’s strength.

  6. e) The pandemic threw the most hostile conditions for any organisation to operate within, and might otherwise have thwarted a new charity’s ambitions to deliver. However, our strong model and tenacity of our volunteer team capitalised on adversity to throw themselves into the storm and this has resulted in a unique opportunity to shape our offer, refine our delivery methods and become super versatile. It has, without doubt, shaped our entire future.

  7. f) On the other hand, covid has detrimentally impacted on volunteer availability and, whilst the public have been generous with physical goods, their offering of time or monetary donations has dramatically decreased. The charity’s progress has been hindered by this and requires alternative resource strategies.

2. AID DISTRIBUTION PRIMARY OBJECTIVE:

To reduce harm to wellbeing caused by lack of essential human requirements of food, warmth, clothing and a decent home to be safe and function within.

Stemming the impact of adverse life effects such as poverty, financial crisis due to illness, redundancy, bereavement or incidents like flood or fire damage or fleeing violence and leaving possessions behind, by providing practical relief that enables individuals to have breathing space to re-balance and move forward into less vulnerable situations where they can absorb additional support effectively.

OUR ACHIEVEMENTS:

Ongoing work requiring development:

Primary Objective:

3. SUPPORT SERVICES

To enable people who are struggling to rebalance their lives to access emotional and practical support to begin the process of healing, rebuilding, balancing and re-designing their lives on their own terms.

Preventing unnecessary harm to wellbeing caused by being denied access to therapeutic input due to lack of finance, long waiting lists or postcode lotteries.

Draw together experts in mental health and wellbeing to get support faster to the community

Develop the opportunities for peer support to empower people to be part of the solution for themselves and others.

What we have achieved:

4. SOCIAL ACTION:

Primary Objectives:

• To remove and prevent the causes of harm to groups of people in the community, responding to their common concerns and social issues

• Maintaining pride of people who have received kindness, by enabling them to contribute to social action activities that maintain their sense of value and bring people from all social circumstance together in equitable common purpose.

What we achieved

OUR FINANCIAL POSITION

As the first year, this was always going to be a tough learning curve with both procedural systems to be implemented and being able to demonstrate credible behaviours in what is a very comprehensive service offer, whilst having very little funding.

When Wellbeing in Action was formed out of the informal community activities and passion of our founding team, we had not envisaged anything within our risk assessment that looked remotely like a pandemic. This held both adversity and opportunity for us in equal measure. We have been struck by adversity in the form of reductions in public giving of both time and money as the community went into lockdown mode. Communicating with the wider world to retain their attention and support was a huge challenge and we have had to use social media very smartly. We were hindered by several things:

  1. We have experienced problems establishing a Paypal account to receive donations, due to their insistence in us having to provide a Tax URN reference, which we do not have as we are not a registered company. This has prevented us having a Facebook ‘donate’ button which is a huge impediment. This was still not resolved at the end of our first year despite correspondence and raising complaint with the authorities concerned. We will continue to try to iron this out.

  2. Without the credibility of at least one year of accounts, many funders were unable to consider our applications for grants. Even with the benefit of this milestone being passed, some are only providing a small percentage of the year’s income which, naturally we predicted to be very small. It will take careful navigation and perseverence to break this barrier.

  3. Some funding opportunities have been very well aligned to our core work, particularly in relation to women and children in crisis, but our constitution embraces all genders and age groups and this has prevented us accessing women specific income which has been hugely disappointing considering the relevance of the funder’s objectives to our own.

  4. As a relatively unknown (despite very active) small charity, other partners did not work closely to collaborate on funding strategies as they might have in previous years, because they were mainly working from home and many networking meetings stopped completely.

  5. It was difficult to get good quality meetings with supporting professionals such as book keepers and accountants – making it hard to gain help to learn good methods and get our systems rolling smoothly. Likewise it has been difficult for the trustees to convene in person, making it a great challenge of communication for our Chief Officer to implement development strategies, gaining advice and approval and rolling this out into the restricted frontline activity.

Despite these challenges, we have been proud of the work of the Chief Officer and the Director of Resources – both volunteers, for the dedicated and relentless professional input to creating and operating a set of systems that mimic that of a much more mature charity than we are. We have agreed a strategy of ‘aim high’ and set the course to behave as a well established organisation, so we model the future and are well prepared for growth.

We have been equally proud to have been assessed as a suitable partner for a grant based charity to assess and distribute their grant scheme to our beneficiaries. This has enabled us to disperse £4,600 of aid to local families. This alliance has brought huge relief and benefit to the most disadantaged people and has inclined us to explore additional partners so we can expand our portfolio of crisis relief to people in need.

We created an online fundraising platform with People’s Fundraising (formerly Golden Giving) which has enabled us to use appropriate accounting systems for all manner of income, including donations, appeals, raffles and ticket sales. This is not as widely known as Just Giving, but yields more income with low fees and is user friendly as we develop our skills in this area.

We established a Sum Up account to enable us to take card donations as people were evidently not in the habit of using cash during the pandemic. The fees have been reasonable and enabled us to capture public financial support better.

The Chief Officer has invested in training and awareness from the Institute of Fundraising to ensure tight policies and compliance with national and local regulations. Each of our activity risk assessments contains a financial section to ensure we look at the risks and mitigation of them in relation to the financial impact on the charity.

This year’s income has been unsophisticated in source, being from public donations, community fundraising and a small grant. We benefited from some roll-across income as a gift for set-up costs, which was approved by the committee to be used to secure a

rental unit on a 10 year lease (with risk minimising break clauses at years 1, 3 and 6) at an annual rental of £7k plus operating costs. This investment provides wellbeing activity and training spaces as well as an administrative base and incurred one off expenditure of ingoing legal costs and fees, equipment and refurbishment items and the usual insurances. It is a huge asset with potential to generate further income in future years.

Our appended accounts indicate our financial exit situation as having £3,375 of unrestricted funding rolling into our second operating year. Whilst this is not a princely sum, it is a huge testiment to the delivery team when considering the small income streams, hugely difficult operating year against a context of massive delivery increase during the pandemic crisis, and developing a new building base for both beneficiaries and administration with all the ingoing costs that inevitably incurs.

Principal risks and uncertainties

Financial sustainability and the charity’s financial model remains a key risk, given its dependency on trust and foundation income. Uncertainty over post-pandemic influences means we must chart a brave course with an eye on the long term future in order to remain relevant and cohesive to potential funders and our beneficiary needs alike. We must also be nimble to see opportunity unfolding in the community and maintain strong networking to be in a position to respond swiftly. We are fortunate to have a very diverse skill and experience set within the leadership of the team, and very dedicated volunteers to enable this. However, this leads to our primary area of weakness in that the entire team are engaged on a voluntary basis and we know that even passionate volunteers often meet life circumstances that draw them into paid opportunities for a variety of reasons. It is essential to us going forwards that we model our costing structures on an ‘acting as if’ basis – costing our projects at full cost recovery with an aspirational view to retaining a paid and skilled core workforce. We have demonstrated what we can achieve with volunteers alone, and this is hugely encouraging as an indicator of our potential with solid, secured, paid staff to create an extra layer of professional strength. However, at this point in time we are aware of how vulnerable the resources are and our entire strategic and frontline teams are dedicated to managing this by:

OUR ACCOUNTS

The following accounts have been drawn up by:

Ian Barrett FCA FCIS

Barrett’s Chartered Accountants and Chartered Tax Advisers, 22 Union Street, Newton Abbot, TQ12 2JS

Dated 25 July 2022

As the charity trustees, we take responsibility for the preparation of the accounts in accordance with the requirements of the Charities Act 2011, in accordance with guidelines for small charities with income of less than £25k. We confirm we have overseen the relevant book keeping and receipt records and bank statements and are satisfied they represent a true and accurate analysis of the income and expenditure for Wellbeing in Action for the year ended 30[th] September 2021.

WELLBEING IN ACTION

Charity no. 1192217

Receipts and Payments Account for the period ending 30th September 2021
2021
Total
Receipts
Public donations 3,012
Fundraisingevents
Loans and deposit refunds
Benefciary grants		 1,480
2,100
1,448
Grants 1,220
Pre-registration net income 12,665
Total Receipts 21,925
Payments
Beneficiaryaid and services 3,375
Social action events 4,047
Esatblishment and equipment costs
6,755
Volunteers' expenses 468
Marketing 423
Sundryexpenses
Transport		 217
894
Equipment 1,761
Legal and financial fees 422
Office and administration 188
Total Payments 18,550
Surplusfor the Year 3,375
Bank and cash balances at start ofyear
Bank and cash balances at end ofyear		 -
3,375
WELLBEING IN ACTION WELLBEING IN ACTION
~~Char~~ityno. 1192217
Statement of Assets and Liabilities as at 30th September 2021
2021
General Restricted Total
Assets
Cash at Bank 3,375 3,375
Cash In Hand - - -
3,375 - 3,375
Debtors - - -
Total Assets 3,375 - 3,375
Liabilities
Accountancy 240 - 240
240 - 240
Note
The trustees confirm,in accordance with the Charitable
Incorporated Organisations(General)Regulations 2012,
that at theyear end the CIO did not have anyoutstanding
guarantees to thirdparties nor anydebts secured on the
assets of the CIO.
Approved bythe trustees on ~~27 July~~
…............................................2022
WELLBEING IN ACTION WELLBEING IN ACTION
~~Char~~ityno. 1192217
Statement of Assets and Liabilities as at 30th September 2021
2021
General Restricted Total
Assets
Cash at Bank 3,375 3,375
Cash In Hand - - -
3,375 - 3,375
Debtors - - -
Total Assets 3,375 - 3,375
Liabilities
Accountancy 240 - 240
240 - 240
Note
The trustees confirm,in accordance with the Charitable
Incorporated Organisations(General)Regulations 2012,
that at theyear end the CIO did not have anyoutstanding
guarantees to thirdparties nor anydebts secured on the
assets of the CIO.
Approved bythe trustees on ~~27 July~~
…............................................2022

Signed: ________ Dated: 27 July 2022 (Original signed copy held at HQ Barry Wadlan

Chair

for inspection as required.)

Thanks & Gratitude

The effort to mobilise a credible, needs-responsive, instantly valuable service in a community of high needs and at a time of the most bewildering social circumstances as the pandemic has been nothing short of a breathtaking effort by the most dedicated people who have entirely lived and breathed their motto of ‘if we can, we do’. The volume and quality of contribution to public good through the eradication of harm to people’s wellbeing has raised the bar for frontline service providers in our locality, and Wellbeing in Action has instantly become known as an organisation who move swiftly, with compassion and deliver volume whilst going the extra mile without dropping the ball in relation to a highly personal service to the most vulnerable individuals and families.

As our work continues to grow, the trustees pause to acknowledge those who have generously contributed to our early success in this very embryonic and fragile first year. Without the support, generosity, goodwill and experience of many partners who have embraced our concept and enabled us to seek opportunities in unlikely places we would not have been able to achieve all that we have. We must particularly thank the following organisations for their support through resources, mentoring, guidance, encouragement and kind words:

Mr Neil Vaughan and the Community Support Team Teignbridge District Council Devon County Council Devon Community Foundation Splitz Domestic Abuse Service Together Drug & Alcohol Service CassPlus Teignbridge Indoor Market Manager and Traders Wollens Solicitors Scott Richards Solicitors Mr Chris Wills Newton Abbot Rugby Club Councillor Jan Bradford Councillor Liam Mallone Exeter University Students Young Devon Women’s Institute Teignmouth Thrive Project, Paignton Age Concern, Torbay Acts of Kindness Sally Henley – Newton Abbot Town Council Dart & Partners TDAS Torbay Staff of Newton Abbot Magistrates’ Court Administrators of Spotted Newton Abbot and Torbay Teinbridge Voluntary Services Devon County Council Public Health Team Claire & Paul Sampson – Sampson Europe Ltd Kingscare and Do it for Deaks Charlotte King – The Pebble Ridge Practise Mr Dave Watson – SSAFA HITS Food Bank and THAT Food Bank Neil, Cheeky Cherry Café Mercy, Tiger Noodle Bar Mr Steve Holdup – Torbay Display Wilko Homestores Teign Housing Livewest Housing The Anchorage Hotel Acts435 The Rosalind Hill Foundation The Marjorie Jones Trust Tony and the team at Clearwaste South West Jacqui Winterburn at Suez

And to our incredible operational leaders, volunteers, community donators and supporters.

Most significantly, heartelt thanks to the people who have been brave enough to reach out for help and who, when they can, have so proudly contributed back in the smallest ways that have changed, and even saved lives. We continue the hard work relentlessly for and because of you. You matter and you are valued.

Our magazine highlights stories, case studies and a full gallery of our activities throughout the year. Available on request.