Charity warns it will have to close after funding axed

ACHARI T Y h a s warned it will have to close after 25 years, after i t s funding from the council was axed.

The Coach House Trust, which provides support for people who experience exclusion from mainstream society and who want to get into work, said staff will be made redundant.

It offers workshops for adults aged 16 and over, in skills including gardening, woodwork art, computing, music and healthy eating.

The charity applied for £ 583,003, over three years, for its work from the base in the west of Glasgow. It said funding “will assist isolated people who suffer from mental health issues, learning disabilities, addiction and homelessness to reduce isolation and loneliness and improve self- esteem”.

However, despite being funded previously it was not successful in getting any cash from the council’s £ 55m Communities Fund and says it will run out of funds within a few months.

A spokesperson for the trust said: “This decision will close the Coach House Trust down. Timescales to attract other funding, given how little there is around, will be against us.

“This will mean 10 redundancies but more importantly, our current and future service users will be deprived of a service that in all its time has never met with criticism from referral agencies, in fact quite the opposite, we have been regularly praised and won many awards.”

The chair of the trust, Don Jamieson has written to the council chief executive Annemarie O’Donnell, council leader Susan Aitken and convenor for equalities, communities and education, Christina Cannon, but said he has not received a reply.

He added: “We run a service that will never be self- financing and local authority funding is important.”

Glasgow City Council didn’t comment on the Coach House Trust’s specific case but said the process was different from previous rounds.