DTCP - Hackalong...update
Thanks so much for showing an interest in this fun ride… it will be held at the offices of the wonderful and incredibly supportive Three Straight Lines on Tuesday the 13th March, kicking off at 6.00.
Dorchester Trust for Counselling and Psychotherapy is a charity of 10 years + that provides long-term counselling services on a 'pay as much as you can afford' basis to those with deep-rooted mental health issues.
We support those who have longer term mental health issues – many of which link back to childhood trauma and events – often including mental, physical or sexual abuse. These issues cannot be solved quickly – especially if the client has been repressing and suffering from these issues for many years, if not decades.
With the huge pressure on the NHS – who must keep the ‘flow’ of clients in and out of the system, many of the clients we support are ‘lost in the gaps’. Some clients are not deemed either serious enough for the NHS or have left the system due to various dependencies or other life-style and life choices or situations.
Our work contrasts with the provision of talking therapies (i.e. CBT, counselling, psychology services) in the NHS which for the vast majority of people/patients is of a short to medium term nature i.e. 6 to 16 sessions. This means that for many people their mental health or psychological difficulties remain largely unresolved requiring them to be re-referred back to NHS services and to their becoming the so called 'revolving door patients'.
Slow, precise, detailed, supportive work can take many months, if not years itself to unpick and address long-standing issues – but we are important, we really help people get better and not relapse and represent into the system or continue in their huge battles alone.
We provide these detailed counselling services in sessions with the clients (now we have around forty of them) and offer a ‘pay as much as you can’ scheme – where for however little – we do encourage clients to pay something – this could be from £5 up to £25 an hour. The usual hourly charge for psychotherapy counsellors is £50+.
We receive no funding from the NHS and rely on grants and donations.
We have a mixture of trainees (students at university placement – that we help to train by providing them with their clinical experience) and very experienced and practising counsellors - who give a vastly reduced rate for their time and services to allow the charity to continue and of course, once you start working with a client – you have an in-built empathy to help and support.
We have 9 months left to guarantee the future of the Trust, as we must dig into our remaining reserves to support our clients. Costs are going up, funding is scarcer, grants are much harder to come by.
- We need to attract new practitioners willing to give their time at a reduced rate to support our clients.
- We need to attract new students that we can support in their training.
- We need to raise the profile of the Trust.
- We need to generate some funding.
I’m working through a raft of funding and grant applications focused on outlining the support that we provide to students as well as clients – to see if we can generate some project-based funding to help kick-start the process and buy some time.
But we need brains… in effect this hack is to ‘relaunch’ and re-focus the Trust and specifically its outbound and outward facing persona to generate some funding and PR fast.
The evening will focus on four streams....
(Re) Brand, messaging and positioning.
A short term immediate (maybe gorilla) Fundraising campaign.
Digital assets and tools (including website design and functionality)
Social Media tone of voice and strategy for the remainder of 2018.
Thanks so much again for wanting to get involved – we really appreciate it.