The Growing Well Report of Trustees and Annual Accounts 2024, which covers the 12 months to the year ended 30th June, 2024, have been produced and are available to download here.
It has been a year which saw the launch of our second successful replication with the opening of Growing Well West Cumbria in Egremont, and we are thankful to The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, Copeland Community Fund, and the National Lottery Heritage Fund and National Lottery Community Fund for helping us achieve this.
Having resourced a new team and opened our West Cumbria site in the last financial year, our focus for the coming year will be consolidation. Importantly, due to our recent growth, we will be able to support the recovery of 30% more beneficiaries this year than last.
Message from the Chair
“I am very pleased to report that Growing Well has made significant progress in delivering on our stated goal of operating across multiple sites across Cumbria. This has allowed us to support record numbers of beneficiaries on their journey to recovery from severe or medium mental health issues.
Most importantly I would like to thank all our staff, volunteers and supporters who have enabled us to achieve so much.
Our site at Tebay was open for the full year and has helped over 200 people so far through the core service and welcomed a further 2000+ day visitors. We’ve also delivered an NHS severe mental health project to support cohorts of people seeking asylum.
Our third site, in Egremont, opened in April. I would like to thank particularly all our funders, nuclear supply chain volunteers and community volunteers who supported our staff to open.
Our crop share programme is already operating, we have beneficiaries on site and our redundant town centre location now looking luscious and green, with thousands of visits already received. We have been very encouraged by the welcome we have received from the West Cumbrian community.
We enjoyed welcoming all our supporters at the official launch on 1st October.
Our first site, at Kendal, is now operating as well as ever. We have helped almost 300 people this year. We have widened Sizergh’s geographic reach and the beneficiary base is now coming from the Lancaster and Morecambe areas, in addition to the areas we have historically served, South and Central Lakes and Furness.
I wrote last year that, with Egremont open, our focus in the short to medium term will be to build the volunteer base at each site, refine our therapeutic and business model and gather very detailed evidence of the impact of what we do. We have grown volunteer numbers and believe the therapeutic model is as strong as it has ever been. We are developing our data to demonstrate the effectiveness of what we do.
We have continued to face an extremely challenging funding environment with overall charity sector income having fallen due to the cost-of-living crisis and heavily oversubscribed grants and trusts fundraising channels.
We were very pleased to welcome Helen Duxbury to our Trustee board. Helen is Development Manager for the Cumbria Wildlife Trust and has decades of experience in charity income.
We were also delighted with our supporters’ and communities’ response to our 20 year anniversary fundraising. It was wonderful to see how many people were engaged in such a wide variety of initiatives.
Now the charity is operating across multiple sites, it is clear that in order to be sustainable, we need to develop our ‘commissioned’ income.
This could be workplaces and employers commissioning occupational health support for their staff or aligning our work with statutory provision to enable us to be contracted or commissioned for our work by the NHS. This means we will be less reliant on one off donations and better able to plan for the longer term.”
Jim Sharp, Chair of Trustees
“This truly is a fantastic asset to the local Cumbrian community and as someone who places huge value on mental health, I am delighted that the NDA has been able to be part of supporting such an important service.”
David Peattie, CEO, Nuclear Decommissioning Authority