Funding the community houses

Funding the community houses The Philadelphia Association's therapeutic communities have helped hundreds of people over the past forty years, and we are now working hard to ensure that the two community houses have a secure long-term future, and can continue to offer care in the community to people in need. Please call us on 020 7794 2652 to find out how you could help support our work.

The need for more houses

We are fortunate to own our two houses (The Grove and Freegrove Road). Unfortunately our lease ran out on the third house we used, causing even more pressure on places.

Our ideal solution would be to acquire a house on a long-term basis at a peppercorn rent. To be financially viable, it would need to be a large house (at least 6 bedrooms).

A real success story

We run an extremely lean service. All our therapists work part time and we operate with the minimum of administrative support. Our aim is to keep the cost of living in our houses to the absolute minimum. This enables us to offer refuge to a wide variety of people – those on benefit, those attempting to hold onto a job, and those who want to get back to work while living in the house.
It costs us roughly £20,000 a year to run each of our two houses, that do not receive state funding.

This includes providing support, maintaining the building, and funding our central management. (This is on top of the rent covered by housing benefit.)

For a six-bedroom house, this amounts to support costs of £64 a week per resident. This compares extremely favourably with other services. An entire house can be kept open for a year for the cost of keeping one resident in hospital for 3 months.

Fund-raising is a priority

We need to raise all the money to support residents. Any contribution will be of enormous help, but as we need to plan for our communities on a long-term basis, regular commitments are especially valuable to us.

All the money we raise in our current fund-raising drive will go to:

Keeping both our current houses open
Expanding the number of therapeutic communities we can offer.
Maintaining and refurbishing the houses.
Covering the inevitable empty rooms between one person leaving and the next arranging to arrive.
Helping people pay for their individual therapy.
Helping residents who want to work part-time or study and are unable for a time to pay the full rent.

Help us to change lives

If you can, please help us support the houses by giving us a one-off donation, by making out a standing order, by remembering us in your will, or letting us use a suitable house. You can download a donation form.(PDF file, 56K)

For further information, please contact us at the Philadelphia Association.