End of life charity Marie Curie estimate that more than three million people have been bereaved since the pandemic began. Many of those affected haven’t been able to say goodbye properly, or to grieve. And even those who haven’t suffered a bereavement have had to deal with the sadness and isolation that comes from being apart from loved ones.
We know that, with the gradual easing of lockdown, a number of groups are keen to restart their face-to-face services, and are awaiting guidance on how to do this.
Where are we now?
So far, only England has announced a clear pathway out of lockdown. Once the devolved nations’ governments have also announced their lockdown-easing plans (and we’ve had time to fully understand them) we’ll be able to share our plans for supporting groups (if they wish) to restart their services safely.
Some of our groups have recently been asking for help to assess grant applications. This might be because they don’t have enough volunteers to form a grants panel, or because someone who’s part of the Coordinating Team needs a grant but is worried about their privacy.
In our last Community Networks email on 12 February, we informed you of work taking place to resolve some issues on our website. These issues are concerned with how local events and services are pulled from the Portal onto groups' pages on the main website, which is done by an automatic update that runs every evening.
Unfortunately, delays from our developers mean these issues are yet to be resolved.
MS is often misunderstood, but by shining a spotlight on the experiences of people living with MS we can help to change that. MS Awareness Week runs each year, this year it’s from 19 until 25 April and is your chance to stand up and speak out. We’d love your help to make this year bigger and better than ever!
Following the departure of Emma Whitcombe in December 2020, we’re delighted to welcome our new Executive Director of Engagement and Income Generation. Clare Horwood joined us on Monday 22 February after 15 years’ experience in the charity sector.
She’s worked at organisations including Target Ovarian Cancer, Shelter, Diabetes UK and Mind. And taken on a variety of roles in this time as well covering Individual Giving, Major Donors, Public Fundraising, Associate Director and Director of Fundraising.
As the vaccine programme continues to roll out, teams across our organisation have been working incredibly hard to respond to our community’s need for information.
One in three calls to our free helpline are now COVID-19 related and we receive many questions from our community about vaccines. The top three questions we’re receiving on the helpline are:
When will I receive my vaccination and will my carer also receive it?
In March it will have been four years since the Government promised to reform social care, and yet we’re still waiting for change. It’s now more important than ever that we continue to raise awareness of the broken social care system – made worse by the pandemic. We want to do this by sharing the stories of people affected by MS.
We’re looking for help to find people from across England to inform our influencing work around social care, and work with our press team to talk publicly about their experience.
Our IT Support Team are urgently investigating a problem with MS Society email accounts. If you have an MS Society email account, please DO NOT attempt to change your login password.
If you try to change your password, you’ll receive an error message and the change will not be processed properly.
Until this issue is resolved, please do not try to change your password. We’ll let you know via this website, or your volunteer manager, once it’s resolved.
We've been working with our developers to fix issues we've been having with publishing local events and services on the website. This is done by an automatic update that runs every evening, pulling any new events added to the Portal onto groups' pages on the main website.
Issues we're working through include:
Making sure when a local group is removed its associated events no longer appear on the website
Making sure events deactivated in the portal don't appear on the website
