racing welfare
Welfare at work Via a zoom call back in May Sally Duckett catches up with Nicki Strong, Racing Welfare’s Head of Communications and Marketing to hear how the charity has dealt with the past year’s events and of its plans for the future Sally Duckett: Nicki, thanks for taking the time to chat about the latest Racing Welfare news. Just to start off, could you give us a recap of the last year – difficult for so many of us as well I am sure for Racing Welfare itself? Nicki Strong: Understandably, it was a really busy year for Racing Welfare, but we were able to respond to the challenges faced by COVID and lockdown by being quite agile in response. Obviously, the charity was never needed
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more than last year, but we were quickly able to take a lot of our support services and community events online, which made a massive difference. We certainly saw growth in the support that we’re providing for people having more people getting in touch. We issued COVID-related grants, totalling over £242,000, and around 45 per cent of the people we supported were reaching out to us for the first time. And we saw a total number of interventions for 2020 at almost 20,000,
that was a 59 per cent increase, year on year. The number of views of our self-help support pages increased by 49 per cent, as well. So we really did experience a great kind of need and demand for our services. And, thankfully, we were able to respond. Obviously, a number of events weren’t able to go ahead and that impacted on our ability to fund-raise in the normal way. But again, we were able to take our events online, we launched an emergency COVID appeal, which was successful. We were very much an early adopter of online events, and launched the phenomenally successful Furlong Factor in April. There was a really big appetite for it and we had about 70 applications. It was trending on Twitter and Instagram, it captured everybody’s imagination and brought everybody together. It wasn’t designed as a fund-raising event, more of a community event, but it did raise
