This past year has been particularly challenging for Donations-in-Kind, West Footscray. The store was terribly busy up to the end of March 2020 when because of COVID19, we had to close as the store is located in one of Melbourne’s “hot spots” at West Footscray.
We reopened in a limited manner as the first lock down eased in mid June but closed again 2 weeks later when the new lock down orders were imposed.
Despite these interruptions in activity, the store shipped 31 containers to 14 different locations. Timor Leste received 11units, Sri Lanka 4, Ethiopia 3 The Solomons 2 and singles to Chile, South Africa, Malawi, Congo, Oman, Nepal, Kiribati, Cambodia and Tanzania. We also despatched two consignments of palleted medical supplies to Timor Leste.
The freight costs for this amount of activity was more than $330,000.
The lock down has delayed planned containers for Sri Lanka, Somaliland , Ethiopia, Cambodia , Vanuatu and Timor Leste.
During this period, volunteers contributed some 8500 hours of volunteer labour to achieve this result.
Donations for our usual hospital supporters have continued at a high level with several new locations making contact.
The school desks and chairs continue to be forthcoming at a steady rate.
Importantly we have purchased a piece of equipment to enable a volunteer medical technician to check every item of specialised hospital equipment we collect to ensure that it is fully operational prior to shipping.
It also enables us to carry out small repairs where otherwise the equipment would go to the tip.
Photo - Hawthorn medical volunteers Peter Lugg, Gordon Cheyne and Suzy Zidziunas
A quick books accounting system has also been implemented this year. This has reduced the amount of manual accounting and also enabled more comprehensive reporting.
The store is in a healthy position financially and we have managed to deliver an operating surplus for the year of $61,505. Quite a bit of this is represented by payments in advance and we also received several substantial donations from store supporters. Importantly, our landlord, Larkfield Estates have been very generous with our rental obligations reducing the monthly rental to $1000 plus GST from June to year end 2020.
The support from the DIK Inc member Clubs has continued with several new members joining in the year for a membership now of 23 Clubs. There also continues financial support from many Clubs from all Victorian Districts as more Clubs realise the opportunity that DIK presents for their International projects.
Photo - Store manager Laurie Fisher, and long-standing volunteer, Mister Long.
The store only operates because of the many hours of activity from our regular volunteers and the strong leadership of the Store manager Laurie Fisher.