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Missing People: no one should be alone

IT f
ood
or G
IT for Good

Your charity made grants of more than £445,000 in 2019. Past Master
STEFAN FAFINSKI, chair of the WCIT Charity, reports

O MUCH money would have been This still left more than £100,000 to be given to
unthinkable in past years, but it illustrates other causes across the four focus areas of the
Sthe exceptional generosity of the WCIT Charity:
membership, allowing us to make grants • Effective education for young people
equivalent to more than £500 per member. • Improving the lives of the disadvantaged,
disabled or socially-excluded
In 2019, we raised £168,000, with £100,000-plus • Helping charities make the most of IT
coming from the Continuous Committed Giving • Improving public understanding of the
(CCG) scheme, and another £50,000 from WCIT capabilities of IT
events and Panel fundraising. We also received a
legacy gift. In 2019 we supported Cyber Girls First, a social
enterprise to challenge the stereotype of IT and
What a show of support from the membership. The technology as boys-only career choices. Only 12
Charity is hugely grateful. per cent of the UK tech workforce is female. Cyber
Girls First’s programme of technology workshops
Most of those funds were already committed to gives girls aged 11 to 14 hands-on experience,
the Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM) and together with talks from senior women in
Missing People, joint winners of the 2018 Charity technology. The impact has been astonishing.
IT Award. CALM’s Project RIO and Missing People’s
Is This OK? initiative both encountered challenges
often associated with new technology projects, but
with the support of the WCIT Charity and its expert
volunteers, everything appears to be in place for
both projects.

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