Charity Focus – Hillingdon Women’s Centre, Uxbridge – £500 donation

The Ten Percent Foundation recently donated £500 to Hillingdon Women’s Centre, a charity based in Uxbridge, after a direct application to the Ten Percent Foundation website.

Who are the Hillingdon Women’s Centre?

Hillingdon Women’s Centre (HWC) has been supporting the needs of women since 1986 as a unique service in our local community. We are a small charity run by and for women aged 18+ that offers a safe and non-judgmental space where women can freely share their concerns and get tailored support and guidance. Our aims are that women assert their rights, lead healthy and safe lives, develop their potential and thrive.

Organisation and Project Background

As a trauma-led, women-only space, we are entrusted by women to help and advise them as soon as they seek support. We have built a strong reputation across different community groups, and the findings from our latest Annual Report highlighted that 67% of our service users came from minority ethnic backgrounds; as a result, many experienced multiple barriers when accessing mainstream services such as language, immigration status, no access to public funds, financial instability and homelessness and as a result have poor self-esteem. Likewise, we found that many of our overall service users (65%) have a history of Domestic Abuse (DA). We have seen a 20% increase in referrals in the last year due to the impact and consequences of the pandemic and subsequent cost of living crisis on women’s lives. This places additional strain on our services as we strive to provide holistic support to all women. Since Covid the demand for our services has grown substantially and to enable us to address this we have increased our staffing levels accordingly. Our current annual costs are around £160,000 of which 90% relates to staff costs. We try to run with unrestricted reserves equivalent to three months of costs and so each year we reach out to as many funders as we can identified who are aligned with our aims and objectives to secure funding.

Funding

The request for funding has been made to go towards providing one to one support.

Sandra Robins, Chair Trustee of Hillingdon Women’s Centre said: “Thank you so much for supporting our charity, in current times every donation makes a difference. Your donation contributes to the costs of providing one to one support and advice to vulnerable women within the Hillingdon Community. Every year we help more than 600 women with issues they face in relation to welfare benefits, budgeting, health and well-being and basic housing worries, with the primary focus being on helping those in crisis due to domestic abuse.”

What is this all about?

Ten-Percent and Jonathan Fagan Business Brokers donate 10% of annual net profits to charity via the Ten Percent Foundation, a charitable trust set up by our group of companies, to distribute monies to charities in the UK and Africa. We have been doing this for over 20 years. The Foundation never incurs any administration costs (other than bank charges which are minimal). All monies donated are distributed to charities and community organisations.

Why do we donate?

We set up our companies over 20 years ago with the aim of being ethical in everything we did. As part of this we decided that a percentage of our profits should always be earmarked for charitable work and set the rate at ten percent. A sudden burst of inspiration meant we called ourselves the Ten Percent Group.

Nominations 2023

We received over 35 charity nominations from academic clients, business clients, transcribers and staff. Decisions have been made to award c£25k to 17 charities and we will be writing about each successful charity over the next year.

We have a strict list of criteria in relation our donating which is available on the Ten Percent Foundation website.

Donations tend to be within the range of £500-£2000 per charity per year, although in the past we have supported charities over a period of 5 years with donations going towards specific ongoing projects.

If you have any questions about the work of the Ten Percent Foundation, please email jonathan@tptranscription.co.uk or visit our website at https://tenpercentfoundation.org