This grant will be instrumental in enabling our mental health charity to deliver the third phase of our service expansion project and support increased service delivery of our hybrid counselling service, which will enable our charity to provide early mental support intervention and help prevent mental health issues spiralling into serious mental health problems and, ultimately, suicide. Our charity is one of only 5 local organisations who offer an accessible and generic professional counselling service on a donations basis in Aberdeen City to increase accessibility to professional counselling. As the cost-of-living crisis continues to plunge more and more people into financial and mental health crisis, maximising the capacity of our accessible, professional counselling service has never been more important. This grant will enable Cairns Counselling to recruit and supervise 10 additional volunteer counsellors, which will enable us to offer 1,500 additional counselling appointments over a 12-month period (each volunteer counsellor provides at least 3 counselling appointments per week based on our service operating 50 weeks per year). This grant will also enable us to contribute towards the management of our counselling and administrative team, counselling and administrative activity, and IT, which will underpin increased service delivery.
