Your Argus
TEXT your pictures, videos and messages to 80360. Start your message with SUPIC or email your tip-offs »
Therapy service faces axe
2:10pm Monday 1st December 2008
Comments (3)When Xavier Itter found he could not cope after his mother was struck down with Alzheimer’s, he turned to a low-cost therapy service to help.
Within weeks, Mr Itter had turned his problems around, arranged suitable care for his mother and got his life back on track. Yet the counselling service that saved him is now facing closure due to lack of funds.
As You Are, based in Southwick, is a not-for-profit service which offers therapy to 90 clients each week from as little as £5 per session.
With 21 volunteer counsellors the service costs £37,000 a year to run yet faces closure because its bosses have been refused funding from ten different sources in the past few weeks.
Mr Itter, 39, a photographer from Kemp Town, Brighton, approached the service after his 59-year-old mother Collette was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
He said: “I was really struggling after my mother was diagnosed.
It was hard to come to terms with it as well as find her suitable care. I thought there was bound to be a catch but there wasn’t. It was great to go somewhere like that where money was not the main issue.
“My friends were all there for me but there is only so much you can talk to them about.
None of them were trained to deal with what I was going through.”
The organisation has held out its begging bowl to many well-known charities and community organisations – all to no avail. An application for £5,000 from Brighton and Hove City Council will be decided next month.
Service manager Nicky Hitchcock said: “The people who come to us are desperate and often suicidal.
“If we close they will have nowhere else to turn or be forced to wait months for other low-cost therapy.”
Tim Loughton, MP for East Worthing and Shoreham, and Hove MP Celia Barlow have thrown their support behind the organisation.
Volunteers say that unless cash is found the service will be forced to close at the end of January.
Have you been helped by the As You Are charity? Tell us below.
Your Say YourThe Argus
Jonathon of Hove, Hove says...
3:11pm Mon 1 Dec 08
GinaC, Hove says...
10:09am Tue 2 Dec 08
In this section
- Jury in Hastings stalker attacks trial told car salesman "terrorised lone women"
- Learn the Brighton Carnival dance
- Sussex councils spend millions on school transport
- Man quizzed over Brighton YMCA blaze
- Sussex swine flu cases mount up
- Portslade schoolboy knocked down at death crash site
- Debt scammers target Sussex
- Paralysed Worthing teenager spends 14th birthday in hospital
- Brighton cabbies 'treated with contempt'
- Sussex disabled boy helped by kind neighbours
Sponsored Links
Local Advertisers
Local Information
Enter your postcode, town or place name
outoftown, says...
2:59pm Mon 1 Dec 08
It is short sighted to allow such organisations as this to fall. One only needs to read of the tragic loss of life, by their own hand, of those who see no way out of their despair. Such organisations may just make the difference. WHO SAVES ONE LIFE SAVES THE WORLD.
I do not live in the Brighton area but my comment is directed to all such organisations, countrywide.