No call for help goes unanswered

This year on the 2nd November Central London Samaritans, the founding branch of Samaritans, entered it's 68th year. For all this time our branch has been open and supporting our callers 24/7, 365 days a year without ever closing. A huge achievement with many challenges along the way, but none more so than this year during the global pandemic. 

Not only have we kept our phone lines open, we have supported our callers on email and have been a pilot branch for the new Webchat service. This service further increases the options for our callers to contact us in the way they feel most comfortable. We have kept our training going, moving it online, therefore ensuring that we have new Samaritan volunteers joining us regularly to keep the branch fully manned. We have also developed an online wellbeing programme for the corporate sector to enable them to support their staff during this very difficult time. We are about to start to support schools again, albeit online like everything else! All this delivered by volunteers and as you tell, despite everything we are all going through, the branch remains a vibrant place, full of innovation, passion and dedication.

Having got through the first very strict lockdown earlier in the year, the various countries within the UK entered more lockdowns at different times in November, as cases of Covid-19 began to rise again. The demand for our service is enormous at the moment and we are in our socially distanced phone room 24/7, responding to more callers who are finding life very challenging at the moment. As Christmas approaches we know that it is a time when feelings of stress and loneliness can feel especially acute. We will be there all through the holiday time, ensuring those who need us have someone who will listen to them and support them during their difficult time. 

It is immensely disappointing that our community Christmas fundraising activities are not able to go ahead during this time. At this time of year we usually have many choirs singing for us around the Capital raising money and awareness of our service. However we enormously grateful to you all for the kind donations we have received through GlobalGiving. You are helping our listening volunteers be there for anyone who needs us, 24 hours a day throughout the coming festive period but of course throughout the year. 

Thanks to you all from all of us at Central London Samaritans.

Since our last report lives for everyone all over the world have changed in a way previously never imagined. In London we went into lockdown on 23^rd March and at Central London Samaritans it meant that we had to adapt very quickly to ensure that we were able to keep our service going safely and in compliance with the various guidelines that were being issued almost daily by the government.

 We are proud to say that despite initially losing a third of our 400 volunteers to shielding and self-isolation, we managed to keep our phone lines open 24 hours a day thereby maintaining  our 67 year old record of having never closed. At the outset, in order to keep safe, our duty room with its 16 phone stations had to be restricted to 4 to enable social distancing but we quickly adapted to this. It was a very challenging time for our Listening volunteers as the nature of the calls reflected our own worries and anxieties about the coronavirus and the more general impacts of lockdown. We needed to support each other more than ever

We were lucky enough to receive an emergency Covid-19 grant from Shaftesbury PLC to further re-configure our duty room and make other adjustments to the building’s internal layout. We completely altered the phone room layout to accommodate 8 phone stations, socially distanced around the perimeter of the room, instead of the original 16 facing each other. This entailed an extensive re-wiring exercise, taking down a wall and making new doorways to enable a one-way flow system within the branch. The phone room is now fully operational, and, although we are still around 100 volunteers down, they are all returning at their own pace. 

 Our next challenge is to ensure that we are able to safely return to welcoming our callers who prefer face to face contact. In 2018/19 we had 4,104 visits to the branch so you can see the importance of this service to CLS. This will require yet more building work to reconfigure our existing rooms into safe environments for our callers and volunteers. 

 As you can imagine, our Outreach Program and Community Fundraising activities have had to stop for the time being. However, as in all times of crisis, comes innovation! We are looking at new ways of virtually raising money. For example, our “Sing for Samaritans” programme which involved choirs singing in public places, mainly railway stations, to raise funds for us has historically  been very successful raising  around £18,000 annually. We are now looking at how to do this virtually. Although we know it won’t raise as much as a physical performance, it will once again perform the essential role of raising awareness of our service and enable our choir supporters to remain engaged. 

 We entered our new financial year with a high degree of uncertainty, particularly around fundraising as it was clear that many of our usual fundraising activities would not be available to us. Our community fundraising events which include Sing for Samaritans and which are only possible through the additional time given by our volunteers, usually contributes around £50,000 annually.  Ordinarily we would also hire out meeting space in our building and give various talks to corporates which combined would be expected to generate around £30,000 annually. 

The year ahead is challenging but we are hugely grateful to all of you who have donated to us in the past and to all of you who are thinking of donating to us in the future, with your help we will still be there answering calls 24/7, 365 days a year, leaving no call for help going unanswered.

• PastedGraphic2.tiff.pdf (PDF)