Friday 29 April 2016

At the beginning of our charity set up we all had very little experience or knowledge of what it actually meant to be a charity. 

We learned  pretty quickly that there was so much that went with becoming a charity.

The first realisation was the fact that you cannot just apply and get your registration number straight away. 
Maybe we were naive but we thought that if you were setting out to help people it would be much easier than it is !!

Then came the amount of paperwork that was involved and the legal hurdles you have to jump over to show that you are acting in a charitable manner.

Eventually we became registered with HMRC. 
This was a massive achievement and had taken a few attempts to get the paperwork correct, but now we felt like we were really getting somewhere. 
A lot of places then took us a little more serious and realised that we were a legitimate group. 
Sadly in today's society there are many unscrupulous people out there that set up bogus charities and dupe people out of their money making people very wary of trusting new ventures.

Next came our mission to take on the NHS and get them to review their current bereavement services. We wrote to many senior people within our local NHS and eventually started hitting the big guys, The Department of Health.

Twitter became a good way of getting people to respond to us, especially when we were getting nowhere with the usual methods of communication. 
At one point we were actually blocked by the Prime Minister as we were tweeting him too much. Maybe if he had responded to us we wouldn't have had to annoy him.

Since we have set up I can't even estimate how many letters, emails and phone calls we have made to people and companies for help and support. 
Initially we got a lot more rejections than offers of support. 
At first we got a little upset by this and even felt angry as we are all so passionate about what we want to achieve. 
We couldn't get our heads around why others didn't feel the same. 

Over time we have come to accept that not everyone we approach will be able to or want to help and the people who have supported us have been amazing. 
We have now got a really solid group of supporters and this gets bigger every week.
Our support comes from all walks of life from families that have been through the same experiences we have to local garages. 

Recently we have started to get people and companies approach us with offers of help. This felt really weird at first and you even become a little sceptical. The tables were turned on us. We now felt like those companies we had initially approached for help.

2016 is heading to be our most successful and busy year to date. We are now working along side a lot of other people and we are definitely being taken serious by the local NHS. 
The Department of Health is still a work in progress but we won't give up. 

The last 3 years have been very hard at times and I am sure that most of us have felt like quitting at some point, but quitting is not an option. 
We are sure that Charlie was given to us for a reason and whilst we have the strength and determination he showed we will never give up.

Thank you to all of those out there that have supported us so far and we hope that you will continue to stay with us as we move into the next part of our mission. 















No comments:

Post a Comment

Charlies-Angel-Centre.org.uk