Claudia Taylor East, the Chief Executive Officer at SOS Malta, believes that one way NGOs can overcome the mammoth-challenge of financing and fundraising as the pandemic rages on is by pooling resources to mitigate costs.

Collaboration, together with investing in serious and professional financial planning are essential to NGO’s survival, she stressed.

She was speaking on today’s episode of The Boardroom, which honed in on the vital role NGOs play within civil society. Locally, there are many smaller organisations providing essential services to Malta’s most vulnerable.

“We as NGOs must look at alternative funding mechanisms and how we are going to mitigate challenges because of COVID.

“There are NGOs, and we have many grassroots, small NGOs in Malta doing excellent work, depending on fundraising. Today this is a much bigger challenge because the corporate giving and the business sector’s generosity is of course suffering as everybody battles for survival,” she said.

Turning to the need for collaboration, Mr Taylor East said:

“We need to come together as NGOs to consolidate what we have and see what we need to develop. This year we saw the Government allocate a good sum of money, but, are we planning, as NGOs, to see what we are going to do after the support ends? At SOS Malta this is what we are doing, and have created the necessary mechanisms to diversify funding.”

Asked about any opportunities presented by COVID, Ms Taylor East said that prior to the pandemic, the NGO had established an online support system called kellimni.com.

“We were in a comfortable position to deal with the uncomfortable, psycho-situations arising from the pandemic. We had people coming in for homelessness, which we had never dealt with.”

Asked about the impact on volunteering, Ms Taylor East spoke of how SOS Malta had worked together with the Malta Health Network to set up a volunteering COVID task force. They worked with the public health department to provide volunteering services, and the response by both local and foreign nationals was described as impressive.

Onto how NGO business models must adapt to survive, Ms Taylor East stressed the importance of having sound, developed financial management systems in place.

“Unfortunately, organisations do not invest in financial management and when you are budgeting expenditure, this is vital. At the moment it is my financial department that is the hub of the organisation.

Turning to advice for other NGOs scrambling to form a plan for the remainder of the year and beyond, she said:

“I would also recommend looking for all the funding mechanisms as NGOs need to be creative and innovative to fit into the funding parameters of the operations of our organisations. We must not be afraid of change. The third sector cannot be lost. We can carry on contributing to the most vulnerable.”