St Joseph's Pre-school in Fishponds, Bristol

Aim

We need to raise £10,000 to help overcome our short-term financial crisis caused by the Pandemic and keep serving young children!

St Joseph’s Pre-school is a community-based Nursery operating in St Joseph’s Church Hall in Bristol looking after children from the age of 2 until they start school. We have now been running for nearly 50 years supporting families and providing care and education for their young children!  

As a not-for-profit group, we strive to keep fees and expenses low whilst creating a parent involving, caring, and nurturing environment for our young children. But the Pandemic has hit us hard! This has been both financially because fewer children have attended over this period but also emotionally as we have dealt with the effects of the pandemic on the children. The children have missed out on important personal, social and emotional development opportunities during this time, not to mention their language and communication skills. In essence, they are needing a lot more support and expertise to combat the effects that the Lockdowns have caused during these crucial years of development in their young lives.

Our staff and Committee have continued to provide support and care for our families over this time and always give more than should be expected of them. Just another group of forgotten heroes trying to do their best!

And yet the Early Years sector continue to be undervalued and have suffered years of under-funding despite being viewed as a ‘crucial service’ during COVID recovery! We have been expected to carry on providing these services with little care or thought to the well-being of staff or the financial pressures we have been put under.  But we have now reached breaking point, and all of our reserves (both financially and emotionally) have been wiped out!

In 2020 we made a loss of over £35,000, despite cutting back on staffing and non-essential spending. Our young children deserve more than that! We need your help to get through these challenging times and to keep providing the services we do which are now more important than ever!  Please help us to get our finances back on track so that we can fully support our children to get back on track too.

We are hoping to raise £10,000 to help make up some of our losses and overcome our immediate short-term financial crisis. If we raise more then it will serve to support our ongoing work and commitment to young families in our local area and keep us on track to serve them for a further 50 years.

This project successfully funded on 8th December 2021