The Moira Anderson Foundation have launched a major fundraising campaign to expand its premises to help meet continuously increasing demand for its services.
We are aiming to raise £50,000 through our 2020 initiative – so named because the Foundation will be celebrating its 20th anniversary next year – to reconfigure our Mavisbank Street base and provide more counselling spaces.
Staff and volunteers ultimately hope to collect a grand total of £250,000, which would allow us to rent or purchase additional nearby premises to be used for extra therapy spaces and office facilities for the growing organisation.
It comes as MAF, which supports people affected by childhood sexual abuse, assists its highest-ever number of people – with more than 400 different clients coming through the doors in 2018, and May of this year seeing a record total for a single month of 60 referrals.
The 2020 appeal is all about expansion, because having more space would give far better provision for clients. We’re having to face up to the fact that if we can’t expand to other spaces and premises, we’d have to stop taking referrals for a while – and we’re determined not to do that, because as long as people are coming to us for help, we want to be able to provide it.
Our first target and the initial focus is to raise the £50,000 minimum to do reconstruction work here in our existing premises, creating new counselling rooms.
If we can then expand into additional premises too, it would give full wheelchair access, we’d be able to have movable glass partitions for flexible space, and create more dedicated therapy and counselling rooms, including a space and the right environment for teens. The plans mean we’d have better facilities, and a better waiting area as the current one isn’t ideal.
We’ve never done anything like this campaign before, but we’ve reached quite a pivotal situation – 20 years on we now have such increased demand, 10 members of staff, various sessional therapists and our volunteers. Our dream would be to raise enough in total to reconfigure all the rooms in our current base and to raise enough money to buy additional premises.
It’s important that our therapy spaces are effective as we need to have the right environment to work with clients – it takes huge courage and strength to walk in the front door and we want it to be absolutely right.
Every penny counts!