Our Grants
Steve Morgan Foundation, through its Covid-19 Emergency funding initiatives, has helped many charities and community organisations respond to the pandemic. Listening Ear was fortunate to receive generous funding from SMF in 2020, including the largest revenue grant ever awarded to Listening Ear in the history of the charity. This incredibly generous donation, from Steve Morgan Foundation and DCMS Community Match Challenge, pledged £316,332 towards LE’s core costs over two years.
This is so important as each year, LE starts the financial year with a significant funding gap and much energy and staffing resource goes into resolving this. For the next two years this is now largely resolved and Listening Ear can put all of its energy into growing and developing the business and realising its vision of providing more therapy, to more people in more places when it matters most. Ultimately this underpins Listening Ear’s mission of believing in the transformative power of its counselling and support services to deliver lasting change for its beneficiaries.
Funding from The Julia and Hans Rausing Trust supported core costs for Listening Ear and enabled the organisation to develop a new website for Listening Ear’s occupational health counselling clients and internal training course development that will support the charity’s income generation in 2021/22. The foundation also supported equipment and software purchase, as well as funding towards staff training in Outdoor Therapy, EMDR and PowerBi.
Funding from Social Enterprise Support Fund enabled Listening Ear to achieve its planned budget and associated activity in 2020/21 by supporting a server upgrade so that Listening Ear could meet the requirements of Cyber Essentials Accreditation and also that the server was sufficient to support the number of staff we have who were required to work from home. SESF funded a new website supporting increased referrals to Listening Ear for those affected by suicide as well as funding towards staff training in Outdoor Therapy and training course development to support our income generation in 2021/22.
Funding from Independent Age enabled Listening Ear to deliver increased services for adults aged over 50 years in order to support those experiencing mild to moderate mental health issues during the pandemic as well as social isolation and loneliness.
Listening Ear gives thanks to the following Covid-19 emergency funders for their generous support of our organisation at an unprecedented time in its history. Funding enabled Listening Ear to pay staff to deliver services usually delivered by volunteer counsellors in training as well as purchasing a number of phones and laptops to properly equip all staff at Listening Ear to deliver remote counselling. In the early part of the pandemic, most counselling courses (whose students regularly volunteer with Listening Ear) didn’t allow trainee counsellors to count telephone or video counselling against the practice hours required for qualifications. Listening Ear lost its volunteer workforce overnight. Funding from the following organisations ensured continued mental health support for people referred to Listening Ear in a time of increased stress and anxiety for everyone. The swiftness of their response to the pandemic made a huge difference to our ability to continue to provide much needed services. Listening Ear will be forever grateful for this funding and send our heartfelt thanks to all employees and trustees of the following organisations:
