Ripon charity launch campaign to raise awareness of adult social care during pandemic
Jennyruth Workshops feel they've been forgotten during the last 12 months
A Ripon charity have launched a campaign to raise awareness of how adult social care has been impacted during the pandemic.
Jennyruth Workshops train adults with learning disabilities in a wide variety of skills, such as woodwork, needlework and painting, so they can produce and sell a range of quality gifts and products. They assist in marketing and selling to develop their social schools.
But during the pandemic they've not been able to access their workshop, so have been having to get creative from home.
Coronavirus has had a detrimental impact on day services and social enterprises across the county, but the charity are keen to highlight how this is affecting service users and their families who use groups like Jennyruth as respite.
They've launched "Small Fish, Big Pond. Help Us Help Them" to bring charities like themselves together to raise awareness of the work they're continuing to do, despite the struggles of the pandemic.
Nicky Newell is Chief Officer at Jennyruth, she said:
"Overall we feel like we're a forgotten sector. There isn't a lot of awareness and even locally some people don't know we're here or what we do and we're hoping the campaign can change that.
"It's fundamental that we're able to keep going for the health and wellbeing of our users.
"We've been very fortunate to continue to receive funding from the local authority because they recognise the importance of all we're doing, but that money doesn't last forever and with the additional costs of setting up at home, having laptops for workers, it all ads up."
The charity are funded through a mixture of active fundraising, social service funding, grants, profit from sales, charitable donations and gift aid. As a registered charity any income in excess of costs is re-invested in equipment and training colleagues to allow capacity to increase.
Anna Smith, Publicity Officer at Jennyruth, said:
"It's not just about us in Ripon. We want this to be national thing. We want this to go as far as possible to prove that yes we might be small but we are mighty and we want to get through this.
"Everyone's been talking about supporting local and we're trying to get that across to the people in Ripon and the surrounding areas.
"We don't want to just survive the pandemic, we want to be able to thrive and so do all the other charities like ours."
You can find out more about Jennyruth and their campaign here.