Our giving program – charities have been chosen!

In our last blog, I announced that e-BAS Accounts wants to start giving back. We are going to do this by way of donating a portion of our profits to certain charities each month. More specifically, we will gift 2% of every client invoice we raise to charity. Over the last 2 weeks, I have researched the various charities I am interested in and have decided upon the charities which will be the recipients of our donations. These charities are listed below:

Charities who will receive our  monthly donations

Ronald McDonald House Parkville Victoria

Ronald McDonald House charities aim to keep seriously ill children with their families at a time when they most need it. Often families live miles away from the hospital in which their children are receiving treatment making it difficult or impossible to support their children at a time when they most need it. Ronald McDonald Houses enable families to stay together offering accommodation to families of seriously ill children. There are currently 16 houses across Australia, offering a “home away from home” to these families. The program also offers family rooms in hospitals which provide family members with a space to rest when needed, educational assistance to children who often miss a lot of in-school contact time and family retreats, providing families with a week’s free holiday at one of their 4 retreat destinations across Australia.

St Vincent de Paul

The St Vincent de Paul Society works to assist the poor, the disadvantaged and the marginalised in our communities. More specifically, the charity assists:

• the homeless
• those affected by disaster
• migrants and refugees
• families (via home visits)
• youth
• elderly
• and others

The charity offers material assistance to those in need via their many second hand shops known by many as “Vinnies Shops”. Much of the work carried out by St Vincent de Paul is done so via volunteers and includes:

• Education, training and supported employment opportunities
• Homeless services
• Disaster relief
• Mobile and fixed meal services
• Migrant and refugee services
• Housing support and emergency accommodation
• Mentoring and social support programs
• Advocacy
• Youth programs – including family, teen, kids, and young carers camps, ‘Buddies Days’, mentoring programs, tutoring and homework clubs
• Budget counselling and
• Much, much more.

Orange Sky Laundry & Showers

Orange Sky Laundry and Orange Sky Showers  are the “brain-children” of 2 young inspiring fellows from Brisbane – Lucas Patchett and Nicolas Marchesi. Essentially, the charity offers free clothes washing and showers from mobile vans to homeless persons across the country. From their website, Patchett and Marchesi explain the concept:

“A crazy idea in 2014 to put two washing machines and two dryers in a van and wash and dry clothes for free. Starting in the streets of Brisbane, Orange Sky has now grown to 11 services across Australia in Brisbane, Canberra, Gold Coast, Melbourne, Sydney, Sunshine Coast,  Perth, Adelaide, SE Melbourne, Wollongong and Hobart. Orange Sky Laundry now does over 6.9 tonnes of laundry every week. However most importantly, has over 1,300 hours of positive and genuine conversations every week.”

The main idea is that whilst the homeless receive much-needed services and assistance via the mobile laundries, they also receive human contact and compassion through one-on-one discussions with volunteers while they wait for their clothes to be laundered. The charity has also just launched “Orange Sky Showers”, a sister charity to the mobile laundries which offers free showers to homeless persons. The 2 charities will work in conjunction offering the full package to the homeless – showers and clothes washing. We love this charity so much – it’s the first of it’s kind and it’s Australian – how could we not support it?

Lort Smith Animal Hospital

Lort Smith Animal Hospital was founded by Louisa Lort Smith in 1936 in North Melbourne, Victoria. Louisa set it up to care for animals of poor and disadvantaged persons and this is still the foundation of the hospital’s mission and purpose today.  Lort Smith is a not-for-profit organisation and offers an adoption centre that cares for animals undergoing medical treatment and provides 24-hour shelter. The hospital also provides fostering services for surrendered animals and has an exotic and native wildlife unit. They actually do loads more at Lort Smith than mentioned here so visit their website to get the low-down! At e-BAS Accounts, we have a great big soft spot for animals so we knew we had to include an animal-related charity in the mix!

How the giving program will work

As mentioned above, we will donate 2% of each client invoice raised to one of these four charities. We will start doing this from 1 July 2017. In the last blog, I talked about how this might work and have decided for ease of managing the program, we will donate $25 to each charity each month and at the end of the financial year, we will do a reconciliation against the amount we have donated monthly against the total amount taken from client invoicing. If our monthly donations are more than those from client invoicing, we will wear the extra expense. If, however, client donations are more than our monthly giving, we will certainly pay the difference. We have set up the monthly donation direct debits for the above charities today so it’s all systems go! We have also decided that each quarter we will send our clients a statement showing the amount they donated to charity – we think they’d like that! In the next blog, we’ll outline for clients exactly how their donation will be processed via their invoice and will provide an example of what that will look like. Until next time, stay happy!