Give a Dog a Bone…and an animal a home
Registered Charity Number: SC044440
About the charity
We care about loneliness in our ageing years, and about the number of animals in shelters without a loving home, so we tackle loneliness in older adults and animal homelessness.
Project Name
Companionship in the Community – support to open our third Community Space
Project overview
There is a secret miracle medicine for elderly and lonely souls and it comes with four paws. We are a young, unique and award-winning charity – tackling loneliness in our ageing years, through animal companionship. Where money is a genuine barrier to adopting, we provide financial support to the over 60s. It’s a win/win – the human gets a friend and the animal gets a home. We have helped hundreds of rescue animals and older adults to have a happier life – together!
Our new project, Companionship in the Community, provides a safe space for retired people to make new friends, learn new skills and mix with dogs. We now have two spaces and welcome over 200 people through our doors each week. The funding would allow us to open a third community space. We offer free activities to the over 60s and a free tea and chat service – for anyone, of any age, to come and mix with our friendly team of companionship dogs. It’s a fresh solution that communities love!
How the £50,000 grant will help
Launching our Companionship in the Community project in Glasgow at the start of 2018 was a risk – it was a diversion from our core work (providing financial support to the over 60s to afford a rescue pet companion). Encouraged by its success, we opened a second Community Space in Troon in November 2018!
We would very much like to open more community spaces – 200 per week footfall (across both locations) for a project that is only 1.5 years old, shows us that there is a real appetite for this fresh solution. We had huge growth in 2018, but this also meant that our cost base had huge growth. We went from a charity with one part time employee, working from home, to a charity with three part time employees and two premises. Our income has steadily grown too and it is our vision to open more community spaces in the future – as this project really works. The grant will allow us to accelerate our plan to open more spaces and help more people in a shorter space of time.
Quotation
“When I found out we won I actually screamed, it’s just such an amazing thing. £50,000 is going to actually be lifechanging to the beneficiaries of the communities that we would like to move into. It’s actually going to revolutionise lives, this chunk of money is really going to make a difference.”
Louise Russell, Give a Dog a Bone
