Like many small charities, Astriid has been in a very challenging financial position over the last few years, and raising money to keep our operations going has been tough. Everybody on our team manages their own health conditions, and sadly, our CEO Steve Shutts is now stepping back due to a worsening in his own progressive illness.
Thankfully Steve will be volunteering his skills as an ambassador going forward, but for Astriid to keep going, radical changes have had to be made. We are truly devastated to have had to say goodbye to the majority of our brilliant staff, and for now, our candidate support programme will remain closed. Current candidates have been contacted, and will continue to receive support. We understand this will be difficult news for the many people hoping to access our support services and we have done everything we can to avoid reaching this point, but now we must turn our hopes to resuming this programme in the future.
For now, we must focus on fundraising and developing services that can also generate income for the charity. Our bespoke consultancy programme, Astriid Consulting, is almost ready to launch, and we hope delivering these services with our subject expertise will continue to make the world of work more inclusive for people with long-term and energy limiting conditions. Though our candidate job-matching scheme won’t be operating, we’re still on a mission to encourage businesses and organisations to create more inclusive roles and hire disabled talent to fill them.
We’d like to take this opportunity to thank everybody who has supported Astriid so far in this journey, and helped us to change hundreds of lives along the way – there’ll be the opportunity to help further during our upcoming fundraising stage too.
Those of us who remain on the small team are committed to advocating for people with chronic illness in the world of work and making this space more inclusive for all, and we ask for your ongoing support and patience while we try our best to make this happen. We’re a small charity, run by people with limited usable energy, but our ambitions remain big. Here’s to the future of Astriid and continuing to make the Invisible Talent Pool, Visible.
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