Save Victoria Community and Youth Centre
Save Victoria Community & Youth Centre!
We are writing to you during the most difficult and vulnerable times for the Victoria Community & Youth Centre. Our community centre is a much loved and used resource in the local community. Over the years we have provided youth club services to hundreds of children, enabled the delivery of free meals to locals as well as free training programs and social gatherings for anyone to attend.
Over the last 10 years or so, our organisation started with humble beginnings of a Tenants & Residents Association meeting in a local school, to growing into being a charity with a mortgage and premises of our own. All of this whilst holding down full-time jobs of our own and volunteering our time to the various projects that we operate.
When the COVID-19 lockdown was announced, we (understandably) received an immediate cancellation of ALL classes and events hosted by individuals and local businesses who use the centre. Therefore, we saw immediate stop to ALL income coming into the building, associated constituted groups and the charity.
This has meant we have had to use vital cash reserves and monies allocated to other projects to keep the building and charity running during these difficult times. However, we cannot sustain the losses we are currently experiencing and are now at the point where our cash reserves are now depleted, and we have no further cash to run either the building or charity going forward.
Current Situation
We want to be clear about the charity’s current situation and how we can help save what is an essential service in the local community. So, we have provided a breakdown of the current finances and why we are struggling.
As soon as the lockdown started and cashflow stopped, we manually turned off our gas and water supplies to the building, we also unplugged all the electricity devices as we could. The only electrical devices working at present are our fire alarm system and CCTV system.
We have used £1200 of our own cash reserves but this has now been depleted.
We have also used around £2,500 of the Bury Council capital funds grant as cash reserves to pay day to day bills for the building but this has now been depleted. Originally, this was granted to us for building works and were hoping the lockdown would be over sooner so we could replace the monies borrowed for running costs.
We currently have a £1,000 gas bill from British Gas. We have received a court summons in relation to this as it is now overdue.
We are due another round of running costs of around £800 this month, this comprises of Gas, Water, Electricity and Broadband.
We are currently around £5,500 in the red. If the situation does not improve in the next few weeks this will slip closer to £6,500 and so on.
The charity is not able to be able to sustain the losses that we are currently experiencing and if continued, we will see the charity cease to exist and all current charitable work undertaken by the organisation will stop.
This means no youth club provisions, no enabling of services like free meals and training to the local community, no dance and drama groups and no social events for vulnerable people in the community. It will mean a much loved and well used resource being closed.
Please help our community and our centre by donating any amount you can afford today!
Stay Safe!
#savevcyc
