Last month we were delighted to receive our first payments of two years funding from each of the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation (who are funding the development of our Volunteering Programme in particular) and the Tudor Trust (who are contributing to our core costs). Each of these trusts has become even more over-subscribed that usual as the voluntary and community sector has suffered widespread losses - we are extremely fortunate, and very grateful, to be funded by both of them.

As many of you know our funding situation has been very precarious over the last nine months or so - like much of the voluntary and public sector, we have been experiencing uncertainty. We have lost some good staff when their contracts came to an end and we were unable to pay them to stay on, and we have had to regroup, plan and begin a longer business planning and development process, even as our two new benefactors agreed to fund us.

With some funding from Coventry City Council as a community centre, we now know that we have enough money to survive – hooray! Of course, we could still do with more, and our activities will not yet be quite as wide-ranging as they were when JRCT, the PCT and a range of other funds were still supporting us a couple of years ago.

Having said that, the only way is up! Our new cooking club is going well, our gardening and open office activities are continuing, we ran a good programme for the Positive Images festival in June (including a language cafe, music session and arts and crafts), and have just taken our Sidney Stringer "Step Up" students into local primary schools to continue their leadership development, our monthly women's events are continuing and we will remain open regularly throughout Ramadan and the school summer holidays.

We will be focussing a lot of our energy over the next couple of months into making the organisation sustainable, building up our volunteer base again, continuing to pursue further funding, earning money and planning for a solid and sustainable future. We have had a couple of interesting suggestions of potential social enterprises which might fit our skills and values, and help to sustainably fund our work - if you have any further ideas like that, please let us know!

We realise that we are actually in a very fortunate position with a good basis on which to continue over the next two years, with particular thanks to the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and the Tudor Trust, and look forward to a vibrant autumn programme.