Sense Scotland

Sense Scotland has been working for over 20 years with children and adults who have communication support needs because of deafblindness, sensory impairment, learning and physical disabilities. As a major strategic initiative Sense Scotland chose to build a new resource centre for service users and combined head office, in the South Side of Glasgow.

TouchBase has a community cafe, expanded facilities for art, music, drama, and woodwork, and lots of space for other activities for disabled children, adults and their families. Families can come here together as a whole family and disabled people have opportunities we couldn't deliver before the centre was built. There are meeting and conference facilities and office space which are rented out to generate "trading" income for future years.

The project cost around £4 million and although Sense Scotland raised about £1.8 million from fundraising activity the rest was committed by the organisation either from reserves, or from borrowing. A project of this scale had not been undertaken by Sense Scotland before and the support from the bank was invaluable. We had developed a good relationship with the bank over a long period which was instrumental in our being able to make decisions to proceed on the project. Obviously cash flows were going to be an issue with Grants coming in and Bills needing to be paid all at different times. The support from HBOS staff was superb, giving professional advice and also understanding the organisations needs at a time when there would be financial stretch, and we had all the other day to day activities as well as building TouchBase.

Registered Charity No: 023261

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