Crucial charities dependent on the National Lottery Distribution Trust Fund (NLDTF) for money have been hard hit by an extraordinary delay in the allocation of grants applied for last year.
The Mail & Guardian spoke to six charities that bemoaned the fund’s silence on their applications.
The deadline for the submission of funding proposals is the end of July each year. Funds are usually accessed before or during the fourth quarter of the financial year, in this case early 2006.
”We’ve received funding for several years and it has never been this slow,” said a head of corporate fundraising at a Johannesburg-based children’s shelter, who asked not to be named.
”Normally, we would have heard by December last year. We’ve been given no reason for the delay, but have been told to be patient and that we’ll hear something by July.”
The fund attributes the delay to the appointment of a new National Lotteries Board, which begins its term this year. The board administers the NLDTF through distribution agencies comprising members of the public who decide on applications.
The executive said the charity has not received funding for a 16-seater minibus needed to transport its 64 children to and from school.
National Lotteries Board spokesperson Sershan Naidoo agreed that there had been a delay in rolling out grants, but argued that this was not unusual. ”The turnaround period from closing date to adjudication is between two months and a year,” said Naidoo. ”We look at applications chronologically — they must be sent in as early as possible. The main complainants are those who handed them in late.”
Naidoo added that as the board was processing grants larger than R1-million it had called for site visits to check the credibility of beneficiaries, further exacerbating the hold-up.
Sylvia Haywood of the Avril Elizabeth Home for the Mentally Handicapped countered that the demand for early applications was unreasonable, as applicants had only two months in which to submit proposals. ”Adverts for applications are usually out by the end of May, but this year, they’re not out yet,” she said.
Haywood said that in 2003 the fund had denied receipt of the home’s application form. Last year, the board rejected its application because financial statements had been omitted from the form, a decision she unsuccessfully challenged.
”We’ve received funding for four years and last year we double checked our application and sent it in early,” she said. ”Only when we phoned were we told we’d been rejected.”
The organisation cares for 160 patients and an additional 20 day-care patients, most of them severely disabled children and young adults. The charity has had to enforce stricter measures on residents in arrears with payments.
Haywood said the organisation was gradually shrinking, having indefinitely closed its doors on 78 patients on the waiting list.
Another fundraising coordinator pointed out that being snubbed by the board did not bode well for a charity’s future, as it made other donors suspicious. Susan Daly, of Kids’ Haven, said NLDTF funding was crucial to non-profit organisations as the lottery was the only donor that funded general running costs.
Deborah Hunt, fundraising manager at the Johannesburg Child Welfare Society, said that due to delays with the R2-million funding it expected from the NLDTF, it could not meet its fundraising targets for the previous financial year. This hampered its outreach programmes to its target beneficiaries who include orphaned and HIV-positive children.
Last week a representative of the Camphill School in Hermanus branded the National Lotteries Board dysfunctional because of the delays.
Childline director Joan van Niekerk claimed that when she phoned the trust fund to inquire about the fate of the Limpopo branch, she was told that earlier applications went the bottom of the pile, hence the hold-up.
Several Childline branches are reportedly in dire straits because they have not received funding from the board.