I’m a business development manager, which means my job mainly involves trying to save the charity I work for. It really is that simple and the weight of the responsibility is exhausting. If I meet my target we go on another year, if I don’t then we have to go to our board of trustees with a deficit, and our charity will fold. Every success or failure is tied to everyone else’s fortunes, the jobs of our staff and lives of our beneficiaries.
Our flagship service, which involves working with children of parents who misuse drugs and alcohol, was cut earlier this year. For more than 10 years the local authority had paid us to deliver this service and we have helped thousands of families in that time. Our organisation depended on that funding to operate. Our only option was to, instead, bid for another contract. We bid for a portion of the treatment services and hoped we could – using the same team and vastly reduced finances – deliver this service while continuing to support the families we had worked with before.
But we’re not qualified to deliver these services – our staff are family workers, not drug specialists. When the new contract arrived, the staff assured me they had the skills and experience to deliver the service. Now, looking back, I know they told me this out of desperation to keep their jobs, and a desire not to fail the families they have spent so long working with.
So far we are struggling to deliver the service. Cuts to local authority funding has meant that we have less money at our disposal and since elements of the service are completely new it has taken longer than we anticipated to set up things such as counselling appointments and support groups. Service users – both new and old – are having to wait longer to see staff and our waiting list has doubled.
Staff are doing their best but the size of their workload means they feel like they are letting people down. One of them said to me recently that they feel like they are chasing their tails – they’re always just about coping. Some are looking for new jobs.
We are making mistakes and cutting corners because our staff are overworked and too stressed to be able to do the job properly. But what choice do we have? Either we do what is asked on the limited budget we are given, or someone else will.
My background as a frontline worker means I know all too well the difficulties of providing services with too little resource. Not quite enough training for the role you are doing and no time to do the training you need.
So when I’m writing a tender or bid knowing full well that it doesn’t offer enough money to do what we are promising I feel guilty. More than guilty I feel negligent, but what choice do I have? The budget comes from the local council – the people who are supposed to know how to finance services that are safe and effective. But I’m not sure that is true anymore.
My financial target was met by winning this contract for drug treatment, but I’m left with a bitter taste in my mouth. We’ve been forced into bidding for survival rather than doing what we’re best at. With staff now stretched to breaking point it’s only a matter of time before service users will suffer.
Confessions of a charity professional is the Guardian Voluntary Sector Network’s anonymous series where charity workers tell it how it is. If you would like to pitch us an idea, click here.
