CCF Crisis Fund

The Crisis Fund benefits vulnerable people on low incomes who are urgently in need of small, one-off amounts of money. Grants are normally are made up to £250 distributed to provide financial support to the most vulnerable people in Cornwall. These small grants can be accessed through a wide range of sponsor agencies such as:
• Drop in centres
• Refuges
• Food Banks
Ever increasing rising costs in living may mean these people face extremely difficult choices in terms of what they can afford to spend their limited money on – for example heating or eating.

During 2017 The Cornwall Community Foundation supported 71 sponsor agencies who assisted over 1000 vulnerable people and their families.

YMCA Cornwall, a recipient of this fund, offer free confidential and independent housing advice to disadvantaged young people who find themselves homeless or rough sleeping, people who have to leave home or people who just wish to leave home. Youngsters who arrive at the centre have suffered trauma, resulting often from family breakdown, abuse, violence and alcohol or drug dependency. The fear and lack of experience about where they will stay the night creates anxiety and depression.

Carolyn Trevivian, Fundraising Manager at YMCA, said: “We have recorded a high number of young people being left in Cornwall after their parents returned to their home towns in another part of the country. The youngest person living here, who had been abandoned in this way, was a week off his sixteenth birthday and had been given £10 by his mother and told to stay with friends before she headed back to Manchester.  Another sixteen-year-old had been brought up by his grandmother with no knowledge of his parents and so when she died he was left alone. He lived with the YMCA for two years before gaining an apprenticeship as a motor mechanic and moving to Camborne to be near college and his work. “