Trustees of a homelessness charity in Kent have announced its closure due to its inability to recover from “imprudent” previous financial and operational decisions.
Gillingham Street Angels (GSA) was founded in 2018 by its former chief executive Neil Charlick, operated across the Medway area and employed 52 full-time staff and 100 volunteers, according to its accounts.
The charity supported people experiencing homelessness, financial hardship and ran services including a food bank and several charity shops.
Its most recently filed accounts for the year ending 31 December 2023 showed that the charity had a total annual income of £1.23m and an expenditure of £1.12m.
‘Allowing GSA to struggle on its current form would be irresponsible’
In a post to Facebook on Monday announcing the closure, GSA’s trustees said that they had “concluded that the charity is no longer financially viable and must close”.
The charity’s founder Charlick, who had been CEO since the charity’s inception, was replaced by Tracey Errington in March of this year.
Errington “immediately saw the need to appoint a new board of trustees”, the trustees said, and assessed the financial and operational viability of GSA.
Despite Errington and the board having “put their hearts and souls into efforts to streamline and stabilise” GSA, trustees said it became apparent that there was no “workable pathway to recover the charity from imprudent financial and operational decisions that were taken in the past”.
Trustees said they had contacted the Charity Commission, whose guidance led them to understand that “allowing GSA to struggle on its current form would be irresponsible”.
No date for the closure has been announced, but the charity said that it was in negotiations with Medway service leaders to “mitigate the effects of GSA’s closure”.
