The anti-poverty charity Trussell Trust has set up a hardship fund for its own staff as the inflation crisis bites, it was revealed today.
Matthew van Duyvenbode, chief strategy officer, told an event this afternoon that the move was part of work to help staff and volunteers “facing stress both at work and at home”.
Van Duyvenbode was speaking on the first day of the Ignites conference hosted by think tank NPC.
He said that charities “have to be thinking of care for staff and for volunteers during this period” and argued that inflation, which is at a 40-year high, “has a significant bearing on staff and volunteer wellbeing, fatigue and burnout”.
Van Duyvenbode said: “We are really proud to say that at Trussell Trust we have not only tried to respond in terms of cost-of-living remuneration [raises for staff], but we have also set up a hardship fund, because we do not know all the circumstances of the people that are working with and for us.
“We want to make sure that anyone who is in a challenging situation isn’t facing stress both at work and at home from the cost of living.”
Manny Hothi, chief executive of Trust for London, told the event that his funder was responding to the pressures of inflation by uplifting some existing grants.
Other funders, including the National Lottery Community Fund, have taken the same decision.
Hothi said: “We give out more money now, that is the scale of this crisis.
“And that includes providing uplifts to existing grantees. They did not have inflation built into their budgets of 10 per cent.”
He said that these were “tough decisions” at a time when difficult market conditions meant that foundations’ endowments may not be growing.
Kester Russell, chair of trustees at Berkshire-based emergency support charity The Cowshed, said that his charity was trying to meet a 200 per cent increase in demand over the last year “against a background where, bluntly, there is less money available”.
Also reflecting on the value of endowments, he said: “What we have seen individually with a number of the funders [is] they quite rightly released large quantities of additional funding through the Covid pandemic, tapping into their capital reserves.
“As they have come out of the pandemic, they are looking to recoup that capital, so that they can maintain their long-term longevity.
“As a result, the level of the grant is reducing and they are restricting the numbers around it.”
In the conference’s opening event, Rocio Concha, chief economist at the consumer rights charity Which?, said: “Every day we are seeing another charity publishing something showing how serious the situation is.”