Editorial

The LEAD Group has made great progress but, in order to consolidate our position and achieve all our aims, we need help with fundraising.

The Community Lead Information Centre, which The LEAD Group runs, is remarkably effective, considering its minuscule income.

The reasons are:

• our Centre Manager, David, works four to five days a week, completely voluntarily. Without his excellent work we could not operate;

• the office space, computer, fax machine, photo copier, most of the furniture, and the electricity are donated;

• our Information Officer  works six days a week, voluntarily, and other volunteers, including

LEAD Group office bearers, members, and many others, contribute a vast range of skills.

This is where our small amount of money goes: 

• each time the phone rings and our Information Officer is out - at a meeting, giving a lecture, appearing on TV or doing a radio interview - she then has to return the call. Most advisory calls take a minimum of 20 minutes and calls for help come in from all over Australia, as far away as Broome; 

• The Community Lead Information Centre runs an excellent library, for which no money is allocated for resource material. We have to gather material from whatever source is available. When students use our library, we ask no payment. Instead, we invite them to contribute articles from other sources. Our library running costs are very high, since photocopying, faxing, stationery and filing cabinets must be paid for (we desperately need another filing cabinet);

• networking, the backbone of all community groups, is a very expensive exercise, involving many STD fax and phone calls to people in other lead affected communities and other costs in disseminating information.

Steps already taken by The LEAD Group to raise money include:

• applying for three Government Grants. Two applications have been rejected, the third is still under consideration. (While we await the decision in December about our grant, we have severely restricted use of the phone, fax and photocopier.);

• incorporation as an Association, and an undertaking to audit accounts since incorporation, in order to give possible donor Corporations confidence that we are a legal entity with rules governing all our operations, including accounting;

• currently the major fundraising project is to write a letter seeking financial assistance from companies, municipal councils and individuals. Because of the high costs of such a letter and accompanying documents, we need to locate likely donors first, by phone. This will require a group of volunteers working from a prepared script, to contact the appropriate person within an organisation, and assess the likelihood of success of our written request for a donation.

Even if you can't make phone calls for us, we would appreciate your ideas on who to phone. We look forward to hearing from you.