Childline at risk as donations plummet
Members attending the charity’s AGM in Dublin yesterday were warned the ISPCC was being pushed to breaking point.
Caroline O’Sullivan, the ISPCC’s director of services, said: “Last year we thought we would break even until the CRC and Rehab controversies struck and then we noticed a dramatic drop in our income.
“December is a very important month for fundraising for all charities but by the end of last December we were down 12%.”
She said the situation continued to worsen — fundraising for the first four months of this year fell by 20%. She said Childline was at risk because, up to now, the charity had never received statutory funding for it. “The national Office for Suicide Prevention have given us €181,000 this year but Childline costs €3.8m a year to run,” she said.
Childline receives 1,800 calls and messages from children every day, mostly after 6pm when most other support services are closed.
The ISPCC’s raised voluntary income totalled €3.7m last year, compared to €4.2m the previous year.
Ms O’Sullivan said they would pull out all the stops this year to have as many fundraising events as possible. She said there was no chance of any more money being saved by cutbacks.
“Staff have had salary cuts — there has been a pay freeze since 2008,” she said. “We have cut everything back to the bone and really we have nowhere else to go. The only thing we can cut now is our services.”
Asked when Childline would take a decision to cut services, Ms O’Sullivan said they would monitor the situation over the next three months. “We have been able to maintain services up to this point using reserves that we built up during the good years but they are depleting day by day,” she said.
She said they wanted people to give as much as they could to the ISPCC.
“We can guarantee that 83c of every euro will go directly into our services,” said Ms O’Sullivan.
And those who had doubts of giving to charity should do their research.
“If they check out the ISPCC’s website they will see that 95% of Childline’s funding comes from the public,” she said. “We also measure our outcomes and we know they are good.”
She said up to 20% of calls were from children who had been sexually and physically abused or neglected.
lwww.ispcc.ie
Monica Rowe, volunteer
“I have seen first-hand the difference in how some people treat me when I am trying to raise money. I have been shouted at, argued with, and most often ignored.
It is very hard to change people’s minds at the moment because they are very angry.
Rose Cross, service user
Rose is a mother who used the ISPCC’s Child Focus service to rebuild her relationship with her 10-year-old daughter and resolve issues at home.
“Just knowing that a service was there for my daughter meant so much to us,” she says.
“You cannot know the feeling of helplessness until your child requires help that you cannot give as a parent.”
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