Life Changes Counselling

You are invited to attend LCC’s AGM on the revised date, Monday 8th January at 1900 hrs. on Zoom. We promise to pass rapidly through the boring bits and concentrate on giving all who have a stake in the organisation the opportunity to tell us how we are getting on from your point of view. Do you have any ideas how we can improve our service to our clients and /or our trainees. Are there any opportunities for the future you can inform us of. Or would you just like to meet the people who run the organisation in the (virtual) flesh? Maybe you would like to pick our brains about where we are going in the future? Perhaps best of all, would you like to join us in helping run the organisation? Whatever your position or point of view , we would certainly like to see you so drop Liz Rose an e mail at coordinator@lifechangescounselling.org.uk and we will send you a Zoom link for the meeting. In the meantime, may I wish you all the best for the festive season and a happy 2024. Philip Meakins Chairman

22/23 Chairman's Report

LCC is pleased to announce that our Paid Counsellor Project (HiWCF) has successfully entered its second year on target. We currently have 6 of our alumni (counsellors who have worked with us and subsequently qualified) working on this project and by the end of next year, this is planned to be up to 8. Not only does this extra workforce help us keep our times from referral to treatment nicely low, the additional expertise and experience they represent is helping our ambition to constantly improve the service we offer to our clients. On a separate issue, our venture into providing a service to the NHS has now also been running for a year. The PCN (GP consortium) for whom we provide the service is very pleased with it and has extended the contract for another year. Well done to all involved for making such a success of this venture.

Annual Report 21/22 and Financial Update Nov 2023

Life Changes Counselling has provided low-cost counselling in the Southampton area for 17 years. We charge according to ability to pay and until recently have been able to run the organisation with clients paying between £0 and £30. Our target for seeing clients is 6 weeks from referral (currently significantly less than this). Since the summer the number of clients unable to pay anything at all has overwhelmed our business model and we have begun to run through our reserves in an unsustainable way. In August the trustees, with deep misgivings, decided that in order to balance the books we would temporarily stop taking new clients unless they were able to pay £35 a session, reducing it to a minimum of £15 if there was significant financial stress. Grant applications were made to fund those who were unable to afford these revised fees. To put these fees into perspective private counselling costs £50 and upwards, whilst NHS and large charities cost out at £100 to £150 a session.

Ed's amazing achievement in the Great South Run - October 2022

The Trustees of Life Changes Counselling invite you to the Annual General Meeting to review the year April 2021-March 2022 and onwards. It will now take place on Sunday 27th November @ 7.00pm on Zoom After the formal business of the meeting, we would like to turn this into your opportunity to contribute your ideas as to how we can continue to improve our organisation. To allow us to plan, please RSVP to: coordinator@lifechangescounselling.org.uk

Our routine financial audit over the last 3 months has revealed that the average donation being received has reduced significantly below that required to continue to fund the work of the Charity. We will continue to see existing counselling clients however the trustees have decided in order to enable the charity to maintain its counselling offering to the community, for the next 3 months we will set a minimum of £20 - £30 per session for new clients who are in financial stress and set a revised payment of £30 - £35 per session for those who are not. The trustees are acutely aware (and very uncomfortable) that there will be some clients who will be financially impacted by this decision and consequently be excluded from our service; the coming winter may well exacerbate this further. As a result, we are currently actively in the process of applying for grants in order to revert to our Charities mission of offering affordable counselling to everyone in the community. We are also looking at ways to increase throughput and thus achieve economies of scale. In the medium term we have plans for new income streams which will also help us return to a consistent and sustainable financial level offering counselling to all. We would like to emphasise this is not a decision we have taken lightly. To put this into context similar services provided by the NHS are charged to the taxpayer at up to 10 times this amount - and may have waiting times of a year or more. We plan to be back to normal in a far smaller time scale.

Life Changes Counselling has for 17 years provided counselling for the Southampton area using voluntary counsellors in their final year of training. On qualifying many of our alumni leave us to set up their own practice or for paid employment. Increasing demand, complexity of presentation and a knock-on effect of increased wait times has meant that we have for some time been looking at ways of expanding our work to meet these challenges by paying our alumni. That way we hope to retain our more experienced counsellors for longer and help their transition to the world of paid employment - a win win situation. Best of all, our clients will benefit from a more experienced and stable work force. Expansion of a predominantly voluntary organisation is potentially a risky undertaking, risking overextending a limited budget and that other, equally important budget - the goodwill and energy of those that work within the organisation. We are thus thrilled to announce a successful bid for a 3-year development grant from the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Community Foundation which will enable us to make this transition to paying our alumni in a planned, financially protected way without breeching either. The plan is to introduce 2 paid counsellors every 6 months until we reach a maximum of 8. In this way these experienced folk will not only be a resource to help with more complex presentations but should help with our drive to get our waiting times back down below 6 weeks.