Not the end-of-year message I expected to be sharing.
This time last year People Know How had just celebrated its tenth year and launched a new strategy in the Scottish Parliament. A year on and all 24 staff are redundant, we’ve said farewell to around 70 VIPs (volunteers, interns & placement students), ceased work in 50 schools, stopped supporting over 1000 people to be digitally included, paused trips on the canal boat All Aboard that we run in partnership with Polwarth Church, and had to draw a line under our research and campaigning.
Funding has always been hard fought, but this year was like no other with a stark change to the funding landscape. We had always adopted a strategy to have a broad mixed basket of funding, but this failed us this year with numerous funds closing and others being massively oversubscribed. Combined with decisions for next year's funding being delayed by funders until February / March 2025, we couldn’t continue in good faith that we would stay solvent as a charity.
Whilst no longer employed by the charity I will be working on a freelance basis for a couple of days a week to run a legacy project and wind up the charity by the end of June 2025. The Board and I are committed to ensuring a lasting legacy that honours all the work, and everyone involved since the charity was established in 2013. I will be embarking on these plans with vigour from January and look forward to sharing more details. Until then you can read more about our closing via a blog run by Volunteer Scotland and published on Third Force News and our previous update.
And finally, you’re welcome to join a FREE webinar being run by McKinney HR: Funding Impacts on Charity and Third Sector Employers – Focus on Restructure, Redundancy & Closure. I’ll be sharing my experience navigating the challenges of implementing rapid and significant changes while balancing the needs of the people we supported, colleagues, and our VIPs.
Glenn Liddall, Founder, People Know How