Advice bureau short of cash

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 34021, 10 December 1975, Page 9

Advice bureau short of cash

Th* Canterbury ' itizens’ Advice Bureau Urgently needs financial help to keep going. The organisation’s second annual meeting on Mondav was told that the bureau had had to manage on less than $3OO during the year and that it had only about $5 left in the bank The chairman of the executive committee, Mrs P. Zeff. said that a donation from the Christchurch Rotary Club had enabled the bureau to launch an appeal recently to a>k the public and businessmen to become Friends of the Bureau. This meant an annua! subscription of S2 for individuals or a minimum of SlO for organisations or businesses. Mrs Zeff said that the response so far had been disappointing. “There is. of course, no ap p A al to emotions when we :

ask for some financial assistance, but the fact that we exist solely to be of service to the general public should be carefully considered,” she said. “The fact is that the bureau supplies a real community need, and our staff of voluntary trained interviewers are workers who give good value . . .” The bureau’s organiser (Mrs J. Lunn) said that the number of enquiries to the bureau’s Gloucester Street office so far this year stood at 7377, about 50 per cent up on last year’s figure. She said that there had been a marked shift in the types of inquiries made. The proportion of questions dealing with purely information was almost the same, while the number of enquiries had almost doubled in fields like marriage, family and personal problems, social welfare and health problems and accommodation, consumer, and budgeting problems.