We urgently need your help to provide continuation funding of our team of professional case workers at Sudden, supporting vulnerable people bereaved in shocking, sudden, and too-soon ways, including by COVID-19, helping from day one of their bereavement for the first ten weeks. Our case workers are trained to respond immediately following devastating personal disasters, providing emotional and practical support in the early days, protecting people’s safety and wellbeing at a time of terrible shock and often enormous need, working in partnership with a range of community agencies whose support we unlock and harness, to help our beneficiaries, together.

Such professional work is not easy, nor very cheap, to deliver; but its provision brings significant and greater cost savings to our health and social services and by enabling our service’s beneficiaries to recover and move forwards with their lives, including their working lives. For example, we are often caring for people with high levels of vulnerability and urgent health and safety risks that need tackling, fast. For example, we may have to organise clinical assessment of mental health, or meet urgent practical needs such as housing if a breadwinner has died. Our beneficiaries often face poverty and isolation, as well as the devastation of a loved one dying.

The Sudden service, set up in summer 2020 as a pandemic response,  has gratefully secured its first wave of time-limited statutory funding from government and the National Lottery Community Fund to set up the Sudden service, with limited capacity, until March 2021.

However, the service costs £1m a year to deliver, and we are urgently seeking funding from all sources, including corporations, organisations and individuals, as well as continued statutory support, to achieve sustainability, and help more people.

Sudden is hosted by an established, and highly-respected charity; Brake, the charity for road crash victims. Brake understands sudden, devastating bereavement and how to help, and I am proud to be its chief executive as well as leading Sudden’s development. Brake’s National Road Victim Service has been supporting families bereaved by road crashes for 25 years and is accredited by the Helplines Partnership, coming runner up in its national awards in 2019. It is funded by multiple government departments and corporations. The Sudden service is led and managed by the same team, to the same exacting and evolving standards.

Please help us achieve a positive legacy from this terrible pandemic, by

• signing up to one of our Sudden corporate supporter packages listed below by emailing corporate@brake.org.uk
• organising a corporate fundraising initiative for Sudden within your team, suppliers or customers
• contacting me personally to discuss Sudden and how you may help, at mwilliams@brake.org.uk

Thank you,

Mary Williams OBE, Chief executive, Sudden Service and Brake