This weekend is finally the digital launch of our wee charity. It is SO EXCITING! The other founders and I have been slogging away behind the scenes for about 18 months getting the charity off the ground. I can't WAIT to share this with our friends, family and local community.
We've registered with OSCR, opened a bank account (more difficult than you might expect) and recruited a full board of trustees who have met three times so far. We've also identified more than half of the senior team, and are beginning the process of finding helpers and group leaders for the holiday! This autumn we will start reaching out to the community to identify the lucky 16 kids who will be the first to come to a SuperTroop week. It has been hard work, and apart from anything else, it'll be so nice to have some feedback when we 'go public'.
Our Care Inspectorate registration is also in progress. This is pretty gruelling. We will be registering under the same category as permanent residential homes for children with disabilities. These places have full time staff and significant resources to allow them to pull together all the paperwork they need to demonstrate that they are providing best practice. We won't shirk our duty to meet the highest standards for our holiday makers, and we're glad to have the opportunity to show it. The biggest obstacle though is the fee. Despite running for only one week of the year* we need to pay the same as a 52-week business would.
This brings me back to the title of this piece. We're doing all we can to build our charity from zero. But there's one thing we can't do alone - raise the money we need. Our volunteers have already spent more than £1500 of their own money getting us off the ground, and the CI fee we need to pay at the end of the summer is over £4000. Please please PLEASE, if you can spare a contribution of any amount - or even become that precious thing, a regular donor - make a donation.
If you can't afford to make a financial contribution, please check out here how you can support us in other ways. Could you consider doing a sponsored activity or event on our behalf? We'd love to hear your ideas and can give you all the info and help you need. And please, share this page and give other people the chance to hear about and support our work! thank you!
* in summer 2018 we will run our first ever holiday in Edinburgh. However our goal is to expand as soon as we safely can, so we can offer more holidays to more holiday-makers, including for adults.