The Club’s mission is to empower every child to reach their full potential.  We help them to achieve this goal through a myriad of different ways; helping them do their homework, providing a space in the art room to develop their creative side, offering opportunities such as our backpacking trip, or teaching them life skills through our Junior Volunteering and Teen Enterprise programs.
We try to capture some of the ways we impact our members, and the community, in our annual impact report and it is interesting to see how some of our data and statistics differ from year to year.
For example in 2018 we served 820 members; in 2019 that number dropped to 602 members, BUT our average daily attendance increased by over 15 children a day.  We concluded that more of our members were coming to the Club EVERY day, most likely because their parents were at work every day of the week.  So although we weren’t able to serve as many individual kids – we were serving those who needed us the most.
We also saw a big decline in single parent households in 2019.  Hopefully that is great news for parents and families, as it was 61% the prior year.
Of course, some of our data, such as household income, single parent families etc is reliant upon the information parents provide us with, and is why it is so important that parents fill out those parts of our annual membership application form.  All data provided is strictly confidential and is used to apply for government funding, grants and donations.  The more accurate our data the more we can apply for, which benefits the kids and the Club.
As for the 2020 impact report.  Well that is going to be widely different from previous years!  Because of social distancing our current membership is significantly reduced and our daily attendance more than halved.  As we are currently prioritizing essential workers, our demographics may have adjusted too, and only time will tell to what extent.
Hopefully by 2021 we will be closer to normality for the Club, and the World, but in the meantime we will continue to make a positive impact any way that we can.