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Concert - Saturday 15th November 2025 @3pm

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 11:09:17 GMT

An opportunity to help LCC and have an afternoon of music.

An opportunity to help LCC - the Northwood String Orchestra will be collecting money for us at this concert at St James' Church , West End Southampton SO30 3AT on 15th November 2025 @3pm - Come along and show your support.”

Lottery Grant Update

Fri, 03 Oct 2025 06:01:33 GMT

Mid-Term Update

Background

In early 2024 we applied for and obtained a lottery grant of £9999 a year for two years to maintain the provision of counselling for our very low income clients. The challenge was to ensure that we spent this in a way that benefitted the most people , and that the spend was spread out equally across the two year period to maintain our ability to support these people throughout this time. This s a complex process because at time of initial allocation it is not known how many sessions will be required. Our initial plan is always a 6 week course but severe cases may extend to 12 weeks, and some may finish early.

At the time our break even costs for our charity work was £25 a session , supported by an NHS

contract to supply counselling to local GP’s . The small profit from this was used to keep the cost of our charity work down. Each client pays what they can afford , and those who can not afford the break even cost ( initially £25) has their contribution topped up from the lottery fund.

In January 2025 the NHS funding for our GP counselling contract was due to run out and the

revised business plan without the financial support of this contract was altered to £35 per session to break even, meaning a greater % of our clients needed support. Work is ongoing to set up further commercial projects to underpin the inevitable shortfall arising from our work with disadvantaged clients, but no major contracts have yet been achieved.

Analysis of Projec t

2024-2025

288 clients qualified for grant support

82 clients did not take up counselling - 28% - this is consistent with our historical figures due to changing mind , obtaining NHS treatment , etc.

206 clients benefitted from the grant .

5 were totally supported

24 were supported with £15 per session

183 were supported with £5-£10

Total spend for first year of grant £1074 slight overspend from planned £9999

Total number of sessions 1056

Average number of sessions 4 per client ( range 1 -12 )

Problems at presentation

ANXIETY and DEPRESSION 25%

RELATIONSHIP 20%

MEDICAL 12%

BEREAVEMENT 11%

TRAUMA 7%

CHILDHOOD ISSUES 8%

DOMESTIC ABUSE (DA) 9%

BURNOUT & STRESS 6%

RETURNERS 1%

SUICIDAL IDEATION 1%

ANGER 1%

AGE

18-29 31%

30-59 60%

60+ 8%

GENDER

M 33%

F 66%

MODE

FACE TO FACE 309

REMOTE 49

2025-2026 ( 4 months data )

To date 312 qualified for grant support

2 totally supported

Most of the rest supported between £10 and £20 a session.

Total spend so far year two - £4775- marginally over plan.

Both years

Vast majority seen within 6 weeks - usually a lot less . One or two take longer but this has been

due to client specifying a single particular date/time which takes longer to pair with a free slot.

Conclusion

This grant has been very successful in enabling us to continue to provide very low cost counselling to a large group of people ,despite increasing the quality of our service by retaining qualified ( and therefore paid ) counsellors, with the inevitable increase in the charities outgoings.

Looking to the future we see no decrease in the demand for low cost counselling . In an attempt to reduce our reliance on grants we have in the past obtained commercial contracts - the profits from which are entirely used to underpin our charitable work . The current contracts have now ceased and so to ensure our continued ability to help those with the greatest financial stress we need to obtain further grants for when this current lottery grant ends in March 2026.

At the same time we need to work on further commercial contracts.

AGM 10/11/2025

Fri, 03 Oct 2025 05:47:58 GMT

Invitation to our AGM 10th November 2025 @7pm

The Trustees of Life Changes Counselling invite you to the Annual General Meeting

To review the year April 2023-March 2024 and onwards.

It will now take place on Monday 10th November @ 7.00pm on Zoom

After the formal business of the meeting, we would like to turn this into your opportunity to contribute your ideas as to how we can continue to improve our organisation.

To allow us to plan, please RSVP to: coordinator@lifechangescounselling.org.uk

GP Consortium Endorses Life Changes

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 17:35:06 GMT

GP Consortium Endorses Life Changes

For the last two years Life Changes has provided a bespoke counselling service for the patients of the Eastleigh Southern Practices GP consortium. The sad news is that the funding for this project has now run out but Life Changes can take pride in the fact that we have provided a service that met, indeed exceeded, the hopes of the commissioning GP’s.

Dr Neeraj Sonpal lead GP of the consortium gave the following endorsement.

“ESP PCN have employed Life Changes Counselling for two years to provide a more bespoke therapy service to our patients for a wide range of mild to moderate mental health problems. We had found that the more generic NHS service did not always manage to ascertain the true cause of the problem. The feedback from patients and clinicians has been fantastic. We would not hesitate to use their services again should our funding stream allow.”

It is encouraging that the folk at the coalface of NHS appreciate our work so much, and whilst with the current financial position all bets are off about further contracts, LCC now has an established track record on which to build for the future.

Chairman's Report 23/24

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 17:08:39 GMT

AGM Chairman's Report 23/24

This year has seen a significant degree of consolidation as we continue to put LCC on a more sustainable footing in the post covid era. This will also be my first AGM as Chairman and I would like to thank the work and effort Philip Meakins has put in over the years to getting the organization to where it is now!

During the last 12 months we have been effectively been providing three services, our core service, supported by our team of 24 volunteer counsellors, the grant funded paid counsellor project (PCP), employing 8 counsellors that have qualified and migrated from the core service, and lastly, the ESP Network project, that uses a number of experienced paid counsellors, majority of which have worked with LCC for some time.

In the period November 23 to October 24 we have provided 2393 counselling sessions, 88% of which have been face to face, and as such, a tribute to the hard work of our volunteers, and particularly the commitment of Liz Rose, our head coordinator and her deputy coordinator, Amy Thomas.

The ESP Network project has meant that we have also seen a significant number of clients through this service as referred by the GP local practices.

Throughout the last year we have worked very hard to keep the waiting list at historically low levels. Consequently, our wait times have generally been significantly less than our target of 6 weeks - a huge achievement compared with waiting times of a year or more in the NHS.

This is a terrific achievement for an organization like ours, led by a team of volunteer trustees and a small, dedicated staff. Hopefully there is more to come!

Sadly, the ESP Network project, came to an end in October as the funding stream is no longer available. This is particularly disappointing, particularly given the brilliant work undertaken by Imelda Byrne and Steven Maidment in getting this service up and running and the hugely positive endorsement of the service by the ESP Network GP’s. The small surplus made on this contract has however helped to subsidise, to some extent, the losses made in the core service. We are, with the help of Imelda and Steve looking at developing other opportunities of a similar nature for the future.

In August we completed the second year of our paid counsellor project (PCP), it now employs 8 counsellors and now delivers around 70 sessions per month. A total of 18 counsellors have worked on this project since it started many of whom have moved on to further paid work on the ESP project. This project is more or less breaking even financially and the challenge is to turn it into a self-financing part of our organisation by the time the grant ceases in August 2025, as was our intention. HiWCT have been very supportive of this project, and have they responded very positively to our report, we have therefore decided to approach them to see if there is any opportunity to extend this grant. Many thanks to Liz Rose who, with myself, is driving this project.

This project, with the ESP Network project, has allowed us to continue to provide opportunities to our counsellors to have some paid work when they complete their training, it also, as a consequence, increases the amount of experience and expertise available in our counselling service and therefore our clients.

On the IT front, Steve Maidment, working initially within the ESP Network project, has used this experience to streamline our Core service IT and databases and this is not only giving us a better handle on data - but this data is available with a fraction of the management work to obtain it. Well done Steve!

Over the last year we have held 3 recruitment events, and we have another in the near future, we seem to have no shortage of applications and Anne Hall has been very helpful in identifying potential candidates with Liz Rose and Amy Thomas.

Central to our ethos is our determination that our Core service must stand on its own two feet so that we can survive even if our more ambitious projects should fail to get funding. Therefore, we reran our business model and as consequence, we realized that we needed to have an average level of fee per client at £25/session to cover our running costs. To put this into context however, NHS organization’s providing the same service do so at a cost of over £100!

Looking to the future the Board of Trustees we believe that in order to continue to provide a sustainable organisation with a lowest possible fee level we need to focus on some aspects of operations. We have agreed the following operational priorities in the short to medium term:-

Improving the utilisation of the services; reducing no shows; ensuring donations are made by clients, as agreed; better utilising of our consulting rooms at Winchester House; and, ensuring that counsellors have 3 or more clients that they are seeing regularly.
Applying for new grants to support and subsidise clients that are short of funds and can’t afford to meet our donation criteria. We also want to apply for grants to extend our paid counsellor projects.
Seek out and develop new opportunities for providing counselling services to organisations, utilising our trained and experienced counsellors.
We are also tweaking our payment model to make sure that client’s that we have screened and allocated to counsellors, pay for their counselling sessions up-front, and attend.

Weekly meetings, with the coordinator team, are now well established, to monitor the parameters above. This team reviews aspects such as counsellor utilisation, grant spent, our new spreadsheet development, recruitment, CORE 10 outturns and grant applications.

We have also developed new Contracts for both Counsellors and Clients, with the help of Ben Rose so that all parties are clearer and more aware of expectations.

You may also be aware that we have opened an additional counselling room at Winchester House, utilizing space already available. This should allow us more flexibility for counsellor sessions matching them closer to times when clients prefer to have sessions.

Whilst we remain in a tight financial position it is stable and we hope that through the improvements above, and new grant funding we can compensate for the loss of the ESP network contract which has been so useful in bolstering our financial position post COVID.

One particular success for this year was the award of a new lottery grant in May '24, for two years, that will allow us to continue to extend our services to those who could not afford even our low fees, well done Philip Meakins!

On the Trustee front sadly both Melani Morgan and Ed Kennedy who have been with us for some time have left, and we thank them for all the work that they have done for us. We have recently been courting a number of potential new Trustees and I’m pleased to say that Professor Karen Temple has joined our team after recently retiring as a doctor from UHS. Karen is already working with us to progress new grant applications.

Many thanks to all within the organisation for their hard work to achieve what we have last year. Meanwhile the Trustees confirm that they have followed the Charity Commission’s general guidance on public benefit and that they have conducted the affairs of Life Changes in accordance with its aim to benefit the public.

May 2024 Lottery Grant Funding

Tue, 21 May 2024 09:03:29 GMT

May 2024 Lottery Grant Funding

Life Changes is pleased to announce we have obtained a Lottery Grant and can once more fund a limited number of financially challenged clients who cannot afford our current minimum fee, as well as continuing our work with Domestic Abuse victims (who frequently fall into the same category).

AGM 8/1/2024 at 7.00pm

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 13:47:20 GMT

AGM 8/1/2024

You are invited to attend LCC’s AGM on the revised date, Monday 8th January at 1900 hrs. on Zoom. We promise to pass rapidly through the boring bits and concentrate on giving all who have a stake in the organisation the opportunity to tell us how we are getting on from your point of view.

Do you have any ideas how we can improve our service to our clients and /or our trainees. Are there any opportunities for the future you can inform us of. Or would you just like to meet the people who run the organisation in the (virtual) flesh? Maybe you would like to pick our brains about where we are going in the future? Perhaps best of all, would you like to join us in helping run the organisation?

Whatever your position or point of view , we would certainly like to see you so drop Liz Rose an e mail at coordinator@lifechangescounselling.org.uk and we will send you a Zoom link for the meeting.

In the meantime, may I wish you all the best for the festive season and a happy 2024.

Philip Meakins

Chairman of LCC trustees.

22/23 Chairman's Report

Mon, 18 Dec 2023 12:22:56 GMT

22/23 Chairman's Report

Chairmans Report Nov 22/ to Nov 23

2023 can be said to be the first year for a while that LCC hasn’t been significantly impacted by Covid. In the period November 22 to November 23, we have organised a total of 2478 counselling sessions - 75% of which have been face to face. This compares with 1938 sessions for the previous year - more than a 20% increase and as such a tribute to the hard work of our volunteers and in particular, the commitment of Liz Rose, our head coordinator. After a false start with a deputy coordinator, this post is now being very ably filled by Amy Thomas; welcome Amy.

Historically our wait times have been significantly more than our target of 6 weeks. I am particularly pleased to note that increasing our volunteer counsellors to 28 and adding in 6 paid counsellors has brought the wait times down to well below target. It is currently less than 3 weeks. These statistics show that LCC is an ambitious organisation that punches well above its weight with a significant commitment to improvement. As with any organisation there are further improvements to come, but we are travelling in the right direction.

Providing counselling with our volunteers is our core service and will remain our priority. Our revised business model requires an average fee of £25 a session to provide this service, and this is achieved with a range of £20 - £35 according to means. We are confident that this core service will remain viable if this fee structure is maintained. With private counselling available at £60 or more and large charities and NHS bodies costed out at well over £100 this represents remarkable value and indicates the lean efficient nature of our organisation , and meets our stated vision of providing excellent counselling to those who would not normally be able to afford it .

A lottery grant in November 22 allowed us to extend our services to those who could not afford even these low fees but that pot of money is coming to an end, and in order to continue to provide a service to these folk we need to obtain further grants. Grant applications are in progress.

In this period, we have completed the first year of both our Paid Counsellor project (PCP) and ESP projects - the latter being our first foray into a providing counselling for an outside organisation. These two projects represent the first stages of our ambition to gradually increase the amount of experience and expertise available in our counselling service as well as supporting our alumni at the start of their careers.

The PCP project is now 18 months into the planned 3-year introduction. It now employs 6 counsellors and has delivered 594 sessions, within a few % if the planned number at this stage of the project. A total of 11 counsellors have worked on this project after qualifying, of whom 3 have now moved on to paid work on the ESP project. Year 2 of the PCP project should see us increase our paid work force to 8 with a 3rd year at this level, all supported by a 3-year grant. This project is more or less breaking even and the challenge is to turn it into a self-financing part of our organisation by the time the grant ceases in August 2025. Many thanks to Liz Rose and Chris Orton who are driving this project.

Our small contract to provide counsellors for a local Primary Care Network (the ESP project) has been a great success, and the contract has been renewed for a further year. We now have 3 of our alumni working on this project, and our vision of supporting our counsellors at the beginning of their careers has started to be achieved. The small surplus made on this contract has to some extent ameliorated the losses made in the core service, and ideally, we would slowly grow this work with further contracts. However, NHS contracts are notoriously fickle and subject to all sorts of abrupt cancellations, so we need to tread very carefully. The ESP project has been brilliantly taken forward by Imelda Byrne who is now stepping sideways once more to share the load with Steven Maidment. His IT expertise should be a great help with the managerial side of the organisation.

On the trustee side Liam Croucher stepped aside to concentrate on achieving full accreditation - we hope to see him back soon. Meanwhile Chris Orton and Cathy Jones, have really begun to apply financial and managerial rigor to the various facets of the organisation which bodes well for the future. We have also welcomed Anne Hall, who has already been helpful in applying the wisdom gained in her extensive experience of many facets of the counselling profession. As alluded to above, we are slowly expanding and would welcome one, or even two more trustees to add to our knowledge bank.

Looking to the future it is salutary to observe that a similar organisation based in Lymington has recently folded. Organisations which are dependent on grants or contracts for survival will always remain vulnerable to forced closure if these grants or contracts are suddenly withdrawn, so our policy of a self-funding core service should enable survival. If we continue to obtain grants we can continue to extend our service to those who cannot pay, without putting the whole service at risk. Equally, if we can obtain NHS contracts we can carefully grow our charity, but always with a careful eye on the precarious nature of these contracts so that we don’t become financially too reliant on them. In order not to overwhelm our small team of coordinators and trustees we probably need to introduce a bit more paid management capability, but again this needs to be done with care so that the increase in costs inherent in this do not financially overwhelm our business model. As with the various counselling projects mentioned above, our approach to this must be cautious and financially prudent progress.

I would like to think that sufficient NHS provision of Mental Health services would one day make our service redundant. At present this is far from the case so that we should continue to support those who fall through the NHS net. My thanks to all within the organisation for their hard work to achieve this. Meanwhile the Trustees confirm that they have followed the Charity Commission’s general guidance on public benefits and that they have conducted the affairs of Life Changes in accordance with its aim to benefit the public.

Good News!

Fri, 10 Nov 2023 19:19:46 GMT

Good News!

LCC is pleased to announce that our Paid Counsellor Project (HiWCF) has successfully entered its second year on target. We currently have 6 of our alumni (counsellors who have worked with us and subsequently qualified) working on this project and by the end of next year this is planned to be up to 8. Not only does this extra workforce help us keep our times from referral to treatment nicely low, the additional expertise and experience they represent is helping our ambition to constantly improve the service we offer to our clients.

On a separate issue, our venture into providing a service to the NHS has now also been running for a year. The PCN (GP consortium) for whom we provide the service is very pleased with it and has extended the contract for another year. Well done to all involved for making such a success of this venture.

Annual Report 21/22 and Financial Update Nov 2023

Fri, 10 Nov 2023 17:46:10 GMT

Annual Report 21/22 and Financial Update Nov 2023

Chairman' s Report click here

LCC Chairman’s Report 2021/22 and up to AGM

Last year’s Chairmans report found us, emerging from the worst of Covid, solvent with a reserve of 50% of projected expenditure, and seeking premises for resumption of F2F once Covid relinquished its grip. Our hopes of free accommodation in Solent university were dashed by a change of university personnel, and in April we judged that in view of this we needed to risk spending out on commercial premises. Suitable rooms were found, starting in May (at less expenditure than we had historically paid for our old premises), and I was confident that we would rapidly fill these rooms with a throughput that was equal to our historical pre-Covid numbers.

I was wrong. Covid played a part by coming back in the summer and significantly increasing our cancellation rate. The change back from online to F2F was more complex, and less popular with counsellors than envisaged. The country’s financial situation took a turn for the worse and the number of clients unable to pay for their sessions reached a record high. Our business model required an average donation of £15 and a high throughput, and by July neither goal was being reached, and our reserves were taking a bashing such that they were in danger of running out by the end of the financial year. An extraordinary Trustees Meeting was called in July 2022 and with great misgivings, the trustees voted to continue to support those clients who were already being seen but stop taking any further clients who could not pay at least £15 a session until such time as grants could be obtained to underwrite these economically challenged clients. Further trustee time was found to support the supervisors in boosting client throughput. I am happy to report that average donation from clients is back to sustainable levels, and throughput is improving, although this has some way to go before we can be satisfied.

One issue has been that we have not been able to afford to staff a reception desk and we have been lucky in that we share the building with other counselors and supervisors who have contributed with the mutual support of our trainee counsellors. My thanks to Jo Heap, Liz Rose, and Imelda Byrne for helping in this way. Another of our counsellors who lives nearby has installed a key safe in her house to enable access to the building - our thanks to her for supporting us in this simple, but incredibly important way. Well done, Sue.

All was not gloom and doom. Melani Morgan OBE, our trustee in charge of training, completed a Training Needs Analysis and set about organising a training program to address the needs that had been identified. The resulting program is excellent by any standards, let alone that of such a small unfunded organisation and is a testament to her knowledge, drive and enthusiasm. A separate report describes this program in detail.

At a planning meeting earlier in February this year we identified another problem i.e., that clients with ever increasing severity of psychopathology were being referred to our organization, and this was difficult to address as our counsellors often left the organisation at the very time when they had achieved the level of experience suitable to deal with these problems. We came up with a plan to offer paid employment to our qualified alumni to help keep them with us longer as well as giving them a protected start into the world of paid employment. This was obviously a big change - both financially and managerially for our small organisation, so we planned a gradual adoption of this model over a 3-year period, starting with 2 paid counsellors and eventually after 3 years employing 8. A 3-year grant was obtained to cover this transition. Six months into this project we are looking to take on our third and fourth counsellor, the first pair are working well and some of the grant is helping to defray our accommodation costs.

In the summer we were approached by a group of GP practices to provide counselling for their patients. This was a different group to the previous year and negotiations were much more positive. We employed 3 external experienced counsellors and 2 of our alumni and this project went live on November 1 ^st , 2022. It is a learning process for both sides of the contract, but we are working well together, and this project should also provide significant sums which we will use to underwrite our core work.

The charity has always had 3 streams of income:

1. Client donations per appointment. We make sure this contributes the majority of our income rather than rely on grants which can be withdrawn at short notice, and this increases our sustainability.

2. Fund raising. This year has seen a large increase in this activity making a real difference to our bottom line. Well done Emily Clark, Emily Kelly, and Ed Kennedy, you have shown the rest of us how to do it - now it’s our turn!

3. Grants -In order to retain independent viability, we apply for these for specific projects rather than being central to our financial planning. One such project was to restart our support for financially disadvantaged clients, and I am pleased to report we have obtained a lottery grant for this which will underpin this and allow us to begin once more to take on a limited number of these clients after a hiatus of 3 months - a relatively short time compared with current waiting times for statutory mental health services.

To these core income streams we can now add some help with accommodation by sharing costs with the paid counsellor project and hopefully a significant income from our commercial venture providing counselling for GP’s.

We welcome as new trustees Liam Croucher and Chris Orton. Liam is an enthusiastic knowledgeable counsellor with his own private practice who has thrown himself in to addressing some of the organizational issues we face as well as being a useful advocate for our volunteer counsellors. Chris has a lifetime’s experience in the healthcare business and is helping us keep track of the financial aspects of our increasingly complex organisation. Welcome both. The rest of the Trustees continue to work like beavers behind the scenes in what has been an eventful and busy year. My thanks to them.

Last, but not least, Imelda Byrne has provided much of the energy, knowledge, enthusiasm and sheer hard work which has taken us from the small volunteer organisation she joined to the much more complex, fit for purpose, expanding organisation that we are now. She has decided to step sideways and will manage the GP counsellor project. We are hugely grateful for her efforts on behalf of LCC and very relieved that she will still be part of the team. Welcome too to Emma Mackay who will join Liz in the coordinator team - you join us at an exciting time.

The Trustees confirm that they have followed the Charity Commission’s general guidance on public benefits and that they have conducted the affairs of Life Changes in accordance with its aim to benefit the public as before. One thing shines clear - there will never be a time when services such as Life Changes Counselling are more needed. Keep it up!

Financial update Nov 2023

Over the last year LCC has operated with a minimum fee of £15 per appointment. For those folk who cannot afford even this low fee we applied for and received a £10000 grant from the National Lottery. This pot of money is coming to an end. Additionally, the cost of running the organisation has increased so from now on we are forced to increase our minimum charge to £20 an appointment. Grant applications are pending to underwrite those who cannot afford this, but when our previous lottery grant runs out and until another is obtained to replace it, we will have to temporarily stop taking clients who are unable to afford the £20 per session.

The trustees are not happy with this situation - but it is their duty to keep the organisation financially viable and continue to provide a service. To put this in perspective, private counselling costs upwards of £50 an appointment and an article in the Health Service Journal some years ago showed large organisations supplying NHS counselling cost their treatment at £100 plus.

November 2022 Statement and Funding

Mon, 28 Nov 2022 13:45:38 GMT

November 2022 Statement - Funding

Life Changes Counselling has provided low-cost counselling in the Southampton area for 17 years. We charge according to ability to pay and until recently have been able to run the organisation with clients paying between £0 and £30. Our target for seeing clients is 6 weeks from referral (currently significantly less than this ).

Since the summer the number of clients unable to pay anything at all has overwhelmed our business model and we have begun to run through our reserves in an unsustainable way. In August the trustees, with deep misgivings, decided that in order to balance the books we would temporarily stop taking new clients unless they were able to pay £35 a session, reducing it to a minimum of £15 if there was significant financial stress. Grant applications were made to fund those who were unable to afford these revised fees. To put these fees into perspective private counselling costs £50 and upwards, whilst NHS and large charities cost out at £100 to £150 a session.

Life Changes is pleased to announce that less than 3 months since implementing the above changes we have obtained a Lottery Grant and can once more fund a limited number of financially challenged clients as well as restarting our work with Domestic Abuse victims (who frequently fall into the same category) We are thus once more meeting our vision of making counselling available to all, albeit this grant will only cover about 6 new clients every month. Further funds have been applied for that would enable us to increase this number or extend the period of funding.

It was disappointing to have had to restrict the use of our services, but we are grateful to the National Lottery who have enabled us to make the disruption to our service to the financially challenged within our community, relatively short, and significantly less than the wait times of equivalent statutory services.

Great South Run - Oct 2022

Mon, 07 Nov 2022 19:12:13 GMT

Ed's amazing achievement in the Great South Run - October 2022

The Great South Run was the furthest I have ever run, and I was nervous as to whether I’d be able to complete the run at all. In the 6 weeks running up to the event I had been suffering with a lingering cold which did not help my preparation. However, I felt good on the day and was able to run the 10 miles in 1 hour 40 minutes. I was over the moon with the result , although that later felt slightly reduced on learning an 80-year-old managed the task in 1 hour 30…putting me to shame!

Although I could hardly walk the next day, I was delighted to raise £1,120 for Life Changes Counselling - making the endeavour completely worthwhile. Our organisation is completely dependent on client donations, therefore any additional funding really helps.

I will be doing the run again next year for Life Changes (this time with the intension of a better finishing time than my 81-year-old fellow runner!)

Ed Kennedy, Trustee

AGM 27/11/2022

Mon, 10 Oct 2022 15:21:28 GMT

AGM 27/11/2022

The Trustees of Life Changes Counselling invite you to the Annual General Meeting

To review the year April 2021-March 2022 and onwards.

It will now take place on Sunday 27th November @ 7.00pm on Zoom

After the formal business of the meeting, we would like to turn this into your opportunity to contribute your ideas as to how we can

continue to improve our organisation.

To allow us to plan, please RSVP to: coordinator@lifechangescounselling.org.uk

Affordable Counselling

Fri, 26 Aug 2022 08:40:03 GMT

Our routine financial audit over the last 3 months has revealed that the average donation being received has reduced significantly below that required to continue to fund the work of the Charity. We will continue to see existing counselling clients however the trustees have decided in order to enable the charity to maintain its counselling offering to the community, for the next 3 months we will set a minimum of £20 - £30 per session for new clients who are in financial stress and set a revised payment of £30 - £35 per session for those who are not. The trustees are acutely aware (and very uncomfortable) that there will be some clients who will be financially impacted by this decision and consequently be excluded from our service; the coming winter may well exacerbate this further. As a result, we are currently actively in the process of applying for grants in order to revert to our Charities mission of offering affordable counselling to everyone in the community. We are also looking at ways to increase throughput and thus achieve economies of scale. In the medium term we have plans for new income streams which will also help us return to a consistent and sustainable financial level offering counselling to all.

We would like to emphasise this is not a decision we have taken lightly. To put this into context similar services provided by the NHS are charged to the taxpayer at up to 10 times this amount - and may have waiting times of a year or more. We plan to be back to normal in a far smaller time scale.

An exciting change for LCC

Mon, 06 Jun 2022 10:40:18 GMT

Life Changes Counselling has for 17 years provided counselling for the Southampton area using voluntary counsellors in their final year of training. On qualifying many of our alumni leave us to set up their own practice or for paid employment. Increasing demand, complexity of presentation and a knock-on effect of increased wait times has meant that we have for some time been looking at ways of expanding our work to meet these challenges by paying our alumni. That way we hope to retain our more experienced counsellors for longer and help their transition to the world of paid employment - a win win situation. Best of all, our clients will benefit from a more experienced and stable work force.

Expansion of a predominantly voluntary organisation is potentially a risky undertaking, risking overextending a limited budget and that other, equally important budget - the goodwill and energy of those that work within the organisation. We are thus thrilled to announce a successful bid for a 3-year development grant from the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Community Foundation which will enable us to make this transition to paying our alumni in a planned, financially protected way without breeching either.

The plan is to introduce 2 paid counsellors every 6 months until we reach a maximum of 8. In this way these experienced folk will not only be a resource to help with more complex presentations but should help with our drive to get our waiting times back down below 6 weeks.

New Base/Counselling Rooms

Mon, 06 Jun 2022 10:28:05 GMT

Life Changes has a new base in Southampton.

One of the dilemma’s that we have struggled with here at Life Changes is when and how to return to face-to-face counselling. The pandemic has yo-yo’d back and forth, and various offers of “free” accommodation have eventually come to naught. Entering into a commitment for rented rooms before the pandemic “allowed’ us to utilise them would add an unacceptable financial burden on our ultra-low-cost charity - but we have finally taken the plunge and rented three rooms in Carlton Crescent in the very centre of Southampton. Let’s hope the pandemic has indeed reached the stage where this investment is justified.

This does not mean that we won’t continue to offer online counselling. The ability to talk and see each other from the comfort or security of our own dwelling, despite being many miles apart, has been a revelation, and for many reasons there will always be people who would prefer to access their counselling in this way. The choice will remain with our clients, but for those who would prefer to work across the room with their counsellor, we hope these rooms will provide a pleasant environment which will help the process along.

Edinburgh Marathon

Fri, 03 Jun 2022 09:06:55 GMT

Emily Clark completes Edinburgh marathon despite an injury at mile 18. She toughed it out and raised over £1000 for Life Changes.

Click on our Fundraising page for for the full story..

Our congratulations to Emily Clark who has completed the Edinburgh marathon. As those of you who have been following her training - things haven’t always been going to plan, with recurrent shin splints being particularly troublesome. Luckily, she started training early so was able to complete a decent preparatory schedule despite time out for recovery from time to time.

The weather on the day was perfect; sunny but cool. The marathon course leaves Edinburgh and heads for the coast and by mile 18 she was running well and enjoying the scenery. Soon after this the dreaded shin splints made an unwelcome appearance and the last 10 miles turned into a bit of a nightmare - finally hobbling back into the city and over the line in 5 and a half hours. The time, effort, pain and sheer grit that Emily put into this event is awe inspiring, as is the fact that she has raised more than £1000 for Life Changes.

We will have to see how her injuries impact her plans to complete the London marathon for us as well - but meanwhile let’s take inspiration from her and set up other fundraising events. Life Changes has a robust financial model, but this sort of initiative makes the difference between just scraping by , and being able to confidently go the extra mile for our clients. Emily’s efforts will pay for six 1 hour sessions for 12 hard up clients.

Well done Emily and thank you.

New Grant from Mazars Trust

Mon, 20 Dec 2021 13:16:25 GMT

The Trustees of Life Changes Counselling are very grateful to the Mazars Charitable trust for a grant to underpin our work with victims of Domestic Abuse . This will enable us to support a limited number of clients with this background for longer term counselling than our normal model , whilst maintaining our normal service for other clients.

Grant from Southampton City Council - CCF

Wed, 20 Jan 2021 13:16:31 GMT

Community Chest Fund (CCF)

The Trustees of Life Changes Counselling are very grateful to the Southampton City Council for a Community Chest Grant received in January 2021 to underpin our work with the increasing numbers of Southampton residents who are , by virtue of Covid or other reasons , unable to pay anything at all for our counselling services. Supporting these residents in this way will allow us to deliver counselling to them without putting our financial model, and thus the service to the rest of our clients, at risk.

Emergency Lottery Grant

Tue, 01 Sep 2020 12:48:36 GMT

Emergency Grant from the National Lottery

September 2020

Life Changes Counselling is very grateful to the National Lottery for a grant to cover the abrupt cessation of income brought about by the lockdown at the start of the pandemic . This has enabled us to continue to build our online service in a financially secure way.