UNITY Financial Appeal June ‘09
The UNITY Centre needs your help to stay open.
We need to raise £2,500. Please make a donation today to help us.
Over the three years the Unity Centre has been open in
At the same time we have given support to over 300 people who have been put into detention without warning by the Home Office. Over half of the people we have helped have been released with their families and returned back to
For the last three years we have been open from 10.30 to 6pm five days a week. And we have done all of this with only volunteers and without funding. No-one is paid to work in the Unity Centre and we rely 100 per cent on donations from supporters.
Over the coming month we hope to start an ambitious new project – the Unity in the Community charity (registered charity SCO40466) which will have a second Unity office and shop at Govan Cross. This charity will allow us extend the sort of services we provide for asylum seekers and refugees and will let us organise more intercultural events to bring people together in the local community.
We’ve run into problems that threaten not only to jeopardise the future success of the new charity but possibly also the future of the Unity Centre.
First of all, serious delays by the charity regulator in processing our application for charitable status has meant we have run out of funds for getting the new charity started. We had expected to open the new shop and office in January this year but a change of staff at OSCR meant we had to wait another five months before getting charitable status during which time we have been paying rent on a second shop that we couldn’t open. Now we don’t have enough funds to get the shop ready for opening.
Secondly for the last two years we have had an ongoing dispute with BT over our telephone service. Last year we thought we had resolved this by changing to another service provider but last month we received a BT demand for £1,200. BT are threatening to cut our phones off if we do not pay this and as a small organisation run on a shoestring budget we cannot.
Currently we are helping 15 people and their family who are in detention and are dependent on using our phones to stay in contact with them. We are taking legal advice about the BT bill and have gone to the phone regulator to complain but BT are refusing to listen to us.
The Unity Centre has always existed on a day to day basis and we will struggle on whatever happens but we have decided to set a target of £2500 that we urgently need to raise to secure the future of the Unity Centre.
This is not an impossible sum of money. £2,500 is less than a quarter of the average cost of £11,000 the Home Office spend to forcibly remove someone from the
£2,500 is less than £1 for every person who has registered with us. It is a tiny amount compared to the support we provide.
Please help us raise the money we need. Make a donation today to help the Unity Centre and the invaluable work we do.
Details of how to make a donation can be found here
Many thanks!
UNITY!
The UNITY Centre
30 Ibrox Street
Glasgow
G51 1AQ
0141 427 7992
www.unitycentreglasgow.org