MORE than a third of voluntary organisations in Edinburgh believe they may not survive the next few years, research has revealed.
A survey conducted by the Edinburgh Voluntary Organisations Council (EVOC) found that 37 per cent of voluntary organisations in the city said they may not survive and 52 per cent said they will have to reduce their services in order to stay afloat.
From 1 March, 63 per cent of organisation that get annual grants from the council had not heard whether they were likely to be funded again this year.
A number of voluntary organisations, including EVOC, were to make representations to the council at a meeting this week that was expected to approve a five per cent cut in grants, worth £1m.
Ella Simpson, chief executive of EVOC, said that at a time when voluntary organisations are struggling to find funding from a range of different sources, the cuts would be particularly damaging.
She also said that the cuts follow two years of standstill funding for the majority of the 100 voluntary organisations interviewed.
“The expectations amongst these organisations is that they will also have further cuts in the next few years,” said Simpson. “This is why many believe they won’t survive and won’t be here in a few years time.”
Simpson said the sector is also angry that despite the council being a member of the Edinburgh Compact, designed to ensure good practice in relations between funders and voluntary organisations, 50 per cent of groups discovered their funding would be cut through an article in a local newspaper.
“The council’s communication has not been good, regardless of how much the it has quoted the principals of the Compact,” she told TFN. “The idea of having a secret paper on budgets up until the point it is published on the website, which happened this year, is ridiculous.”
The Broomhouse Centre provides a range of services to a community which has been rated as amongst the worst five per cent in Scotland in relation to health, employment, housing, income, education, skills and training.
The services range from a mothers’ and toddlers’ group to a young carers support project, a training café for long-term unemployed people and a support service for elderly people with dementia.
The centre manager Marie Anderson was also set to make a presentation to the council after it has proposed cutting 100 per cent of its funding for services for communities and five per cent of its children and families department funding.
“We’re finding it more and more difficult to get funding from trusts and foundations because some of them have gone to the wall like Lloyds TSB Foundation, the Laidlaw Youth Trust and the Moffat Trust and others have less to give out,” Anderson told TFN. “There’s just an ever decreasing pot of money for an ever increasing need for more funding.”
In light of the figures, Edinburgh MSP Sarah Boyack is calling on the Scottish Government to do more to ensure that local governments treat the voluntary sector fairly.
She said: “I’m extremely concerned at the findings in an EVOC study that 51 per cent of voluntary organisations say they will probably survive but be reduced in size if there is year on year cuts and that 37 per cent say they may not survive at all.
“These are deeply disturbing statistics. The lack of consultation follows on from the chaos of the council’s aborted tendering process for social care and has left the voluntary sector in Edinburgh in shock. The prospect of around £1m cuts will have deep impacts on some of our most vulnerable groups and seriously compromise their ability to protect some of our most vulnerable citizens in Edinburgh.”
The leader of the City of Edinburgh Council, Cllr Jenny Dawe, said that vital changes in how the authority allocates money to voluntary bodies had been developed through working with charities and other organisations.
Cllr Dawe said: “The current economic situation means there is more demand for council and voluntary sector services, yet it also means we have less income. It’s a shared problem and it needs a shared response. The fact that we have been able to face these incredibly difficult times together is a measure of how far we have come.”
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