Thilen, a Nepalese orphan now sponsored through ROPE, is now healthy and proudly wears his traditional dress.
Andrew Burton, Tony Houghton, Kathy Nussbaum, Stuart Reid, Michael Wood
The objects of ROPE are the advancement and promotion of the Christian faith and the relief of poverty. It aims to help the poorest throughout the world where no other help is available. This help is given regardless of religion, class, age and race. The charity operates in about 70 countries through national partner groups (ROPEholders), who administer funds and care for the poor at the grass roots level. They account on a quarterly basis for all funds spent. During the year over 100 of these groups were in operation, all on a voluntary basis. ROPE seeks to provide help to the poor in a direct way and in places where no other help is available.
With such a large number of these partnerships in operation, there are continual changes taking place, with new groups being added as others no longer are able to continue. All partners are required to send in quarterly reports and if these are not received, further grants are not sent out until the reporting requirements have been met. During the year a new reporting format was introduced to help ROPEholders provide financial and narrative information in a standard format. This assists them in their reporting task whilst helping to increase their accountability and making the monitoring of their work simpler for the UK based staff.
New partnerships have been established in the following places, enabling the grass roots help given by ROPE to meet more identified needs:
Seven of the existing partnerships ceased to operate due to changes in the circumstances of the personnel involved or where agreement could not be reached on a future programme of funding for the activities of the group.
The programmes to receive significant ROPE funding this year were in:Our Sponsorship programmes supporting both widows and orphans also receive significant and regular funding. The programme in Zambia was not able to continue due to the death of one of the members of the ROPEholder group and serious illness of a second. Alternative arrangements were made for the 20 children affected. A new programme was started in Colombia through an existing partner and existing schemes in Brazil, Ghana and India were expanded.
There was less demand on our contingency fund during the year, emergency grants were made to our ROPEholders in Malawi and Zambia for famine relief and in the former also for help in the aftermath of serious flooding. An earthquake in Indonesia affected the work of our group there but we were not asked to assist with additional funding to a great extent.
The activities cited above have taken place around a central core of grantmaking to our committed ROPEholders. They have throughout the year continued to selflessly and effectively provide help to the very poor in their communities in so many countries around the world, through direct aid, micro loan schemes and other special programmes.
During the year we commenced using a Foreign exchange dealer for sending out the bulk of our quarterly grants. Having experienced some initial teething problems the service has proved to be both cheaper and simpler to administer.
Our staff and supporters were very encouraged on hearing the news that ROPE's founder, Michael Wood, had been awarded the Beacon Special Prize for his exceptional philanthropic contribution to benefit charitable causes. This is deserved recognition for his work in developing ROPE and his concern for the poor.
Michael helped to encourage a group in Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire to start a ROPE Charity shop and during the year the volunteers celebrated the fact that the shop had raised £100,000 during it's lifetime for the work of ROPE.
There was a reduction in the number of speaking engagements attended and in response to this a special event was organised entitled "Communicating the Vision". This was well received and helped towards the objective of increasing our volunteer resources for fundraising, visiting of churches/other groups and staffing exhibition stands. It was also an opportunity to share the developments of the pilot group in Kent and begin to consider how this might be developed for the future.
The installation of the new donor database was significant in that it demanded a lot of time and extra resources to achieve. A temporary member of staff was appointed to help with the additional workload generated, in particular with the de-duplication of records and data management. All volunteers received training and after a period of shadow running to test the new software, the system then went live. As an example of the benefits of this investment, the software enabled an effective segmentation of the database for the first time and thus allowed a review of the mailing of our Press Relief newsletter in order to mail active donors and those specifically wishing to receive our communications. This has reduced postage and printing costs
It is good to report that ROPE's income (excluding the value of donated services) has again passed the half million mark. A sum of £505,037 (£472,946 in 2005/06) was raised through donations, there being no legacy income during this accounting period. This is an encouraging performance in that there have been no additional resources devoted towards fundraising and thus demonstrates the committed support of ROPE's core donor group. Gift Aid tax reclaim was also up on last year, to £56,285 (£34,625 in 2005/06) reflecting a continuing drive towards more tax efficient giving.
Although contributions from the work of the ROPE Shop in Chalfont St Giles were a little down on last year at £19,133 this was achieved despite having a smaller group of volunteer helpers available.
The contribution of Friends of ROPE, as shown in the Donated services column of the SOFA, was slightly up on the previous year, primarily due to the purchase and installation of a new computer network and customer relationship database and additional temporary staff to help with this project.
This has therefore reduced slightly the overall amount of available resources for our activities from 2005/06, although this remains at a healthy £617,353.
The level of grant support for our partnerships overseas has been increased further this year, to a total of £573,771 (£554,129 in 2005/06). Changes in these ROPEholder partnerships and the areas receiving most support have been described earlier in this report but the monetary distribution to the different areas of the world has shifted slightly towards Asia during this period. This is due to increased work in Nepal, Cambodia and Sri Lanka. Thus support to Africa and Europe show small decreases on the previous year but this has not had any effect on our core programmes in these places.
Despite the increase in our grant expenditure, the level of reserves has shown a small increase over last year and is therefore currently at a level that is slightly higher than that agreed by the trustees in their reserves policy. This policy provides for a reserve equivalent to approximately 6 months of grant expenditure. Trustees wish these assets to be relatively liquid and therefore retain them in a high interest bearing CAF account.
Last year the Charity received a substantial legacy, which was reported as income in the Statement of Financial Activities. With the specific approval of the Charity Commission, a proportion of this has been transferred to Friends of ROPE to help meet ongoing costs.
Plans for the futureThe Board will be looking towards the consolidation of the IT and database improvements introduced during the year and the introduction of new accounting software as the next phase of this project. This will help meet more of the reporting and information needs identified.
The Board has also recognised the need to move forward in its governance journey and plans to look at the composition and skills base needed and other issues that would improve this aspect of ROPE's work.
In the area of communications and fundraising plans are to be made concerning an increase in resources in this area. A review of the operation of the ROPE shop will be needed as a fresh lease will have to be negotiated with the new landlord during the coming year. Work on revising the ROPE website should also be completed in the next accounting period.
