The other week, a case study went up about us and our work. The header image was one of our favourite illustrations from the Digital Library – it’s from The Chief’s Wedding, and we love all that colour – and there was our name in the title. Emma got the email first and forwarded it round the team with about four exclamation marks.
A few weeks later, we received a very different email. Reach Volunteering is closing.
For anyone who doesn’t know Reach: it’s a charity, been going forty-five years, that matches organisations like us with people who want to give their working skills away for free, to something they care about. We’re a four person team based in Settle, a town of about two thousand people, and finding the right volunteer used to mean asking around the market on a Tuesday or putting a notice up somewhere and hoping. Reach meant we could put a call out and have it land in front of an illustrator in Bristol, or a marketing director in Manchester, someone who’d never have heard of us otherwise.
That’s basically the whole story of our illustrators. We’ve got around 135 volunteers involved with Settle Stories now, and illustrators are the biggest group by far. Every story in our Stories for Schools library gets seven to ten original illustrations, and a lot of the people drawing them came to us through Reach: some building up a portfolio, some coming back to work after being ill, one or two just wanting to draw something that meant something. Those pictures are on screens in classrooms in dozens of countries now.
It’s not only the illustrators, either. Our Chair of the Board of Trustees came through Reach. So did other trustees who’ve brought proper senior experience in branding and strategy to the table, the kind we could never have afforded to hire in. People have helped with our rebrand, our website copy, bits of animation. All given, not paid for.
Emma said it best in the case study: without the volunteers we found through Reach, we wouldn’t have the resources or the website we’ve got, and we wouldn’t have anything like the same expertise sat around our board table. She’s right. It’s just a fact of how we got here.
So reading the closure statement was a strange one. Not because the work stopped mattering, quite the opposite really. Last year, volunteers and trustees who found charities through Reach gave an estimated £60 million worth of their time and skill. Nearly 6,000 people were placed, their best year on record. They’re closing at the top of their game, because the funding to keep something like this running just wasn’t there any more, not because anyone stopped needing it.
We’re one small charity out of thousands who owe Reach something we can’t really pay back. So we just wanted to say it properly, before they go: thank you. To everyone who ran Reach for forty-five years, and to every single volunteer who found their way to a tiny storytelling charity in the Dales because of it.
We’ll miss you.
