Alzheimer’s Society deliver misleading figures.
The decision to give £2.4m to the Alzheimer’s Society (AS) to start training 1m voluntary “dementia friends” under government plans to improve care is provoking bitter laughter among former volunteers and activists who say they were driven out when the charity “professionalised” and disbanded its 236 local branches.
Many volunteers who had raised huge sums and worked tirelessly over many years to set up and run local AS branches and services felt marginalised and “dum bed down” when the society centralized and dismissed its locally elected committees two years ago. The volunteers resented the introduction of charges for support they had given for free and the fact that their hard-earned funds and assets, amounting to millions of pounds, were subsumed by head office. They were also angry that they were left with no control over local services; and across the country many left to form breakaway groups.
Now, the former volunteers say, without local branches the charity ha lost the grassroots infrastructure that would have made it possible to meet the enormous challenge of finding so many new “dementia friends”.
Alan Fowler, who chaired the former Winchester branch he helped run for 16 years, said the number of AS members – its core group – has dropped by 5,000, just over 20 percent, since the 2010 restructuring. He has written to the charity’s vice-presidents, patrons and ambassadors to ask them to look into concerns that the charity is now spending a higher proportion of its income on top-heavy management but less on direct care, advocacy and befriending.
Contact – Alan Fowler at REPoD – http://www.repod.org.uk/independents.html
He said the society’s claim to be spending “88p in every £1 of its £69.557m expenditure” on “direct costs towards improving the lives of people with dementia” is “seriously misleading” when amounts allowed for top managers, publicity, marketing and fundraising are stripped out. Last year’s accounts show the amount spent on direct care and support was £40,349,000, or just 58 percent of spending. Even if research and awareness-raising costs are included, it still only amounts to 80p in the £1.
Ernie Thompson, who started the old Sunderland branch in 1987 only to find himself locked out of the centre – told the Eye: “Certainly it is our experience in the North East that support services have been reduced and paid staff have been made redundant since the Society ‘took over’. “That the Society is now being paid to find new volunteers as dementia friends looks to me like a sick joke. It was what we had been doing for years – only to be summarily dismissed. ”
Oh! Scandals 