How we spend your money

East London Cares work is supported by a network of over 500 incredible volunteers. Thanks to their generosity in sharing conversation and friendship with older neighbours, and planning and running social clubs, we can provide ongoing social connection for over 550 older neighbours with few running costs.  Your support is vital to cover the necessary costs of keeping our programmes going, in particular to ensure that our community has professional support when they need it. 

East London Cares is all about building relationships, and as such, our main expense is staff time. East London Cares’ team is made of four full time staff. Our Love Your Neighbour, Social Clubs and Outreach Programmes each have dedicated staff members, spend their time:

• Addressing safeguarding concerns;
• Managing referrals of older neighbours into our programmes from partner organisations;
• Recruiting, training and managing volunteers;
• Curating and organising social clubs; Managing relationships with older neighbours and supporting them with a range of needs and concerns through referral and direct intervention.

Programme Coordinators are managed by our Head of Programmes, who also oversees the growth, learnings and overall vision of our organisation. 

Check out who our team are, here.

Other costs associated with our programmes include:

• Training for our staff and volunteers;
• Volunteer expenses (e.g. DBS checks);
• Subscriptions to web services and CRM systems to manage data (e.g. Zoom and Salesforce);
• Venue hire and refreshments for group activities;
• Printing and postage of monthly activities programme and remote activity packs.

Since we do not own facilities, we are able to keep our overhead expenses relatively low, which currently include insurance, accounting, management and fundraising.

See East London Cares' accounts on the Charity Commission website here.