Where would we be without them?
ON THE most basic level, the call to action behind the Association of Guernsey Charities’ #WithoutUs campaign could be quite enough. ‘Please support charities to help them survive and thrive’.
However there’s a much deeper point to take into consideration in assessing the real value of the charitable sector to Guernsey.
The AGC itself estimates that local charities need to raise £100m. annually for their running costs, and nearly a third reported a shortfall last year. Meanwhile half of all charities expect that they will have to change services this coming year, while a quarter think they are going to have to do more.
So another prong of the campaign is to highlight the impact that losing any of these services could have on islanders.
Many charities are filling the gap between what government will provide and what the population needs.
How we got to where we are, considering what services are charitable, and which are funded by the state, is less than obvious in certain circumstances, but what is obvious is that the community would be the poorer, arguably even failing islanders, without some of these services.
As the AGC says, we need to understand the impact that charities have on our lives – and what might happen in the worst case scenario that they ceased to exist.