As yet Gardening Leave receives no statutory funding so all our income is from donations, whether from grant-making trust and foundations, Service charities or private individuals who are interested in, and care about our work.
Now that we are in our 3rd year of operation, our funding requirements have changed. When I started Gardening Leave, it was just me and my battered old Passat estate then Poppyscotland generously funded the purchase of a Land Rover Discovery and the Edinburgh Military Tattoo kindly covered her running costs for the first year.
As we welcomed more veterans to Gardening Leave in Year 2, and the cost of running the charity began to rise, we recruited Pamela Smith to be our full-time Horticultural Therapist so that I could concentrate on raising the money to keep the wheels on – a perennial problem for fledgling charities!
Now that Evelyn our Administrator is running the office, I can plan for Gardening Leave’s future, knowing that the day-to-day running of the charity is in good hands.
Not surprisingly our biggest outlay is now staff costs, closely followed by vehicle running costs and printing and design and as we look to open another Gardening Leave at the Royal Hospital in London, these costs will increase so the need to expand the scope of our fundraising activity whilst sustaining a relationship with our existing funders and supporters has never been greater.
Thanks to the generosity of the Pears Foundation, we commissioned Jacqueline Atkinson, Professor of Mental Health Policy at the University of Glasgow to research the benefits of Gardening Leave to our veterans and this research will help to give us the evidence base we need when approaching prospective funders.
