North East charities endured a torrid time during the Covid-19 pandemic. We spoke to Diane Morton chair and founder of Wag & Company a regional charity that has adjusted its business model to secure a future to continue to grow.
How does Wag and Co compare pre and post pandemic?
By the end of March 2020, Wag was nearly four years old, we’d got incredible momentum and we’d achieved some important milestones.
Most importantly people loved and needed our unique Wag befrienders and we’d made over 70,000 friend visits, we had 393 volunteers all over our North East communities. Around 90 older friends in their own homes were benefitting from their Wag friends and so were hundreds of care and medical organisations. People and organisations were seeing the benefit of our work and starting to regularly support us financially. And then, on the 23rd of March we stopped! Or more accurately it paused, whilst we worked out what Wag needed to look like in a Covid lockdown environment. How could we continue to support our friends at this really frightening time but without being able to physically see them and give them the benefit of friends for company and comfort and to see and touch their beloved Friendship Dogs.
During the pandemic all our volunteers supported their older friends in different ways. Contact was maintained. It was a challenging time for our home visitors particularly, as many people they supported were struggling with depression and considerable isolation and begging them to visit.
In March 2021, we launched Emerging from Lockdown…One Paw at a time behind the Government’s roll out plan and initially we were single named visitors, visiting in gardens but by the end of May we were going back indoors. We were also able to start physically assessing new four-legged recruits again.
For our work during Covid, we were awarded a Points of Light Award by Prime Minister Boris Johnson in October 2021.
Post pandemic, when visiting started to become possible, it was very sporadic and unpredictable, starting and stopping as new variants and breakouts emerged. Our home visitors had never really left, always supporting their people in different ways remotely.
As a consequence of this and other related factors, along with the fact everyone was getting older including our four-legged friends, our volunteer turnover has been huge this year and we have worked really hard just to stand still.
We believe to really make a difference to lonely isolated older dog lovers across the North East we need over 1000 volunteers and pre pandemic we were steadily working towards that number. Our volunteer numbers at the end of March 2020 were 393 and at the end of October 2022 the numbers are about the same. It can be demoralising for our team, but things are starting to stabilise again now.
How is the charity trying to rebuild funds lost in the pandemic?
To safely support 500 placements, we need to raise about £200,000 a year and the challenge to raise these funds, without charging the people who need us most, gets harder.
We’ve used the last two years to implement the digital transformation project funded by The National Lottery to make our operation as efficient and scaleable as possible. At the same time we’ve introduced a number of new ways for everyone to support us from our website; a lottery, a supporters scheme – Friends of Wag, an online shop, in memory giving, regular giving as well a virtual and physical events.
Our new Friends scheme is starting to develop with individuals and companies getting involved. We are also starting to see care homes in the region sign up as Community Friends, which takes them to the top of a very long waiting list.
How do people get involved and become a volunteer?
It’s really easy to get involved. All people need to do is have a look at our website and if they have any additional queries to just get in touch with our office team. www.wagandcompany.co.uk/volunteer
How do businesses become a Friend of Wag?
There are lots of different ways organisations can get involved with us, so they should just have a look at our information and get in touch with me and our team and we’ll make sure they get what they need from a relationship with us.
www.wagandcompany.co.uk/friends
wagandcompany.co.uk/wp-content/ uploads/2022/09/Corporate-Friends-Guide_A5_ September-2022-Edition_v4_06.09.22.pdf
Where do you see the charity in 12 monthstime?
Growing our volunteer numbers again and also officially broadening out to cover at least North Yorkshire where we already unofficially have a small number of placements.