This south coast charity rescue service, staffed completely by volunteers, has maintained ‘rescue-ready services’ throughout the pandemic. In fact, they’ve been involved in several ‘shouts’ and responses to incidents of concern.
However, although on-call service has been maintained, the charity has had no income from fundraising over this period. With their usual community fundraising taking a big knock when their 2020 Open Day fundraiser and a special 50th Anniversary Celebration had to be cancelled due to the pandemic.
With running cost of £10,000 a year (and rising) and no external funding apart from what they are able to raise in donations, the PLIRB charity faces real challenges when it comes to staying afloat.
And when this was mentioned to Sean, he started thinking …