In 2022, the charity had come through Covid having been forced to make significant changes in a rapid timescale. Many of these changes were beneficial and the question we faced was what further changes should we embrace to further improve our service.

Two issues were top of our list.  We, like many similar organisations used volunteer counsellors to deliver our service and we felt that the profession as a whole was undervalued with many trained counsellors being expected to work for free after they qualified.  Our own organisation helped train these counsellors, and just as they were getting a decent amount of experience, they tended to leave us to try and set up on their own, or for a lucky few ,go into paid employment. LCC thus was losing their most effective practitioners and constantly replacing them with new trainees.

The trustees came up with a plan to address both these issues.  What if we paid our best counsellors once they had qualified , providing them with a paid stepping stone into their future careers, AND retaining their services and expertise for LCC for longer?  We called this the the Paid Counsellor Project or PCP.

Financially this is a big deal for a small charity requiring a significant change in our financial model.  We applied for, and obtained, a 3 year grant to gradually introduce this project in a stepwise fashion aiming to have 8 paid places after 2 years. This gives us 3 years to complete the financial and organisational changes that will allow us to continue this project.  At the end of year one (September 2023) we are on track with 6 paid counsellor placements but not without some knock on issues for our business model, requiring an increase in minimum client donation to £20 and grant applications to fund those clients who cannot pay.

The second plan was to provide a small scale commercial counselling service. This would give further paid employment to those alumni who had qualified, and then come through our PCP project, and any small surpluses could be ploughed back into the charity to support our core service.  We were lucky enough to get a contract for a local PCN (consortium of GP’S) and at the end of the first year (November 2023) both GP’s and their patients are delighted with the service, and the counsellors have loved working within General Practice.

And looking further ahead? Our Core service of providing cost effective counselling for those not otherwise able to obtain it will continue to be our priority. We believe that the PCP is a positive addition to this service which benefits both our clients and our volunteer counsellors. If we can grow the commercial side slowly so it helps support the Core service both financially and managerially so much the better, but it must be done without financial risk or indeed risk of burnout amongst the small group that run the service.