Somali Adult Social Care Agency Annual Report 1st April 2022 to 31st March 2023
Chairperson’s Report
It’s a pleasure to present SASCA’s annual report for the financial year 2022-3 and to thank:
- all trustees, paid and volunteer staff and service users;
- our funders, especially Manchester City Council.
We were open throughout this year. Client numbers hit an all-time high and have continued to rise since. The reasons are a mix of:
- the “Cost of Living Crisis” hitting everyone hard – not just prices in the shops but austerity which has seen cutbacks in all sorts of public services.
- us getting better at dealing with more cases by improving systems, more training and by developing really useful links with other more specialist agencies like GM Law Centre, GM Tenants Union.
We know our clients, most of whom have difficulty with spoken and written English, much prefer face to face help. So, our open drop-ins are always busy with queues.
From 1 April 2022 to March 2023, we directly helped 2776 clients. That’s 1210 more than last year (although we were locked down for the first 3 months of 21/22).
We help people from all over the City of Manchester – with welfare benefits, housing repairs and rehousing, debt, council tax, getting access to all sorts of vital services like health and simple (unaccredited) information and signposting on immigration.
Experience shows:
- us helping one person face to face usually means that a whole household benefits.
- one case may involve many days’ work spread over months. Sometimes we help someone just by explaining what a simple letter from an agency means or helping them make a phone call. These may seem very simple issues but not dealing with them can lead to catastrophes like losing a tenancy, court action etc.
We are very proud of our recent achievements, including:
- delivering two mental wellbeing projects, under the guidance of Roda Segule who is a trained counsellor. Its combination of groupwork (mornings) and 1:1 counselling (afternoons) on Thursdays is proving very popular and has been refunded by the Lottery;
- used some reserves to appoint Fatima Qassim our first ever Administrator to improve our systems as well as giving clients basic information;
- A well-deserved Spirit of Manchester Award for Mohamed Egeh our longest serving Trustee
Anya Ahmed, Chairperson