It feels as though Just Caring missed the transition to 2019. Apart from having to create a new set of records for each person we support the New Year might have gone unnoticed altogether. That precious opportunity to stop and reflect was nearly swallowed up in the busyness of life as a small charity.

One reason for this is that we don’t close fully over the festive season. There is no coming back after a break with a refreshed perspective. We stay open for at least 2 days every week over Christmas because this can be such a difficult time of year for a lot of the people we support. The media portrayal of an idyllic family celebration is far removed from most of our beneficiaries’ experience of Christmas. This can leave them feeling isolated and unwanted. In addition to this, household budgets will be under more pressure because of the increased cost of heating and the gloomy dark weather has a detrimental effect on many people’s mental health. Praise the Lord that He has kept each of our beneficiaries safe over this Christmas period!

Hence why it is only now when February is nearly upon us that we’re writing an update on our plans for 2019 and what we’d like to achieve by 2020:

Our aims have always included establishing our group activities at a site in Birmingham so that we can open our work out to more vulnerable adults. Last year the door opened for us to move the Gardening Project to Weoley Castle in Birmingham. We have made really good progress clearing the site and finally cut back the last of the brambles earlier this week!

However we are having to reconsider our plans to develop the Gardening Project by adding a kitchen and office space. The site is regularly broken into, and while we are very grateful that our current uninvited visitors don’t cause much damage (our first aid kit and carbon monoxide detector have gone missing!) we need to seriously weigh up the rationale of spending a lot of money to make changes if our Gardening Project is so vulnerable to potential vandalism. We are still keen to get water and possibly sewage connected to the site as this would remove some of the barriers that our beneficiaries face to taking part in activities there.

Please pray for guidance and wisdom as we consider our options and start to look at alternatives – maybe renting a local property where we could run activities instead.

Our other main ambition for 2019 is to take on more beneficiaries who we can support mainly through the Gardening Project and our other Group Workshops. We have been taking advantage of the colder weather to try and get into a regular routine of Craft Workshops on Friday afternoons. So far these have been enthusiastically received but we would love to be able to open them up to more people. There are so many recognised benefits to taking part in therapeutic activities and the need is so great - please pray that God will lead us to the right new beneficiaries and that we will really be able to help them.

While we don’t know what 2019 will bring, we are grateful that we have a Heavenly Father who holds the future in His hands. We trust first and foremost in His faithfulness as we look ahead into the not so New Year.