About The Fire Fighters Charity

About The Fire Fighters Charity

Since 1943, when the then Fire Service National Benevolent Fund helped bereaved families of firefighters killed during the Blitz, we’ve been side-by-side with the fire services community. We’ve evolved over the decades, but our ethos has remained the same: to ensure that we provide whatever support is needed for fire service personnel and their families, helping them through whatever life’s challenges may be.

It is important to recognise that the Fire Fighters Charity is a population specific charity – it is not ‘condition or issue specific’. Our roots as a benevolent organisation remain at the core of our values, of how we work and how we support our wide-ranging beneficiaries, who are united by their connection with a fire and rescue service.

We work closely with all the UK Fire and Rescue Services, providing high quality support, working in partnership to improve health and wellbeing, supporting physical, mental, and social health. Our support is available from the moment of joining the fire and rescue service, throughout careers, into retirement and beyond. As key workers our fire services community are subject to many challenges and the Fire Fighters Charity provides a wide range of support to the workforce and their dependants.

Today, we make a difference to the lives of over 10,000 people a year, delivering preventative health and wellbeing advice and information – through a diverse range of online tools and in-person coaching – as well as physical and mental health support services for those with an identified need.

We also provide a diverse range of specialist programmes to support families and children; Living Well Groups, bringing people together on a regular basis and our befriending service, both of these support our retired population and help to tackle social isolation and loneliness; while our welfare team provides financial assistance when its required, as well as supporting individuals with essentials such as home adaptations.

We want to reach as far into the fire services community as we possibly can, so that all our eligible beneficiaries can benefit from the services that are available to them, including those within hard-to-reach groups such as on-call personnel, our retired community, and dependants.

By investing in innovative new digital technologies; the development of community-based initiatives; the sharing of health and wellbeing content and resources; close partnership working with fire and rescue services and organisations which share our goals; and campaigns to raise awareness, we are confident that we can positively, and sustainably, impact the lives of every member of the UK’s deserving fire family.

We are a strong organisation; with great opportunity to really make a difference to the health and wellbeing of our beneficiaries; We are resilient, and our resilience has seen us and will continue to see us through challenging periods.

For further information about Fire Fighters Charity please visit our website www.firefighterscharity.org.uk

Our Strategic Plan

It is an exciting time for our charity. Despite the challenges of working through a pandemic and the implications of the increased cost of living, we have successfully completed the first four years of our strategic plan for 2020-2025. Circumstance has enabled us to progress more quickly with our transformative change programme, and this year 2023-24, we are now closing our 2020-2025 plan one year early.

We have engaged with more of our beneficiaries and stakeholders, our services continue to be fit for purpose, evidence based and even more relevant in this changing world. We are currently working on the development of our next 3-year strategy to be signed off by our Board of Trustees to begin in April 2024.

Our current strategic plan has seen our charity move forward into proactive support delivering health promotion, developing health literacy, and preventing poor well-being, actively engaging in digital health support, and developing our evidence base, whilst retaining our longstanding and highly valued face to face support, delivered in our 3 centres, in response to health needs and supporting recovery.

Our new plan builds on the successes achieved in the current and focuses on the following key themes to continue to build a healthy future for our Charity and for our beneficiaries.

• Improving health and wellbeing, reaching more of our beneficiaries, with a clear focus on prevention.
• Using our unique fire family knowledge and expertise.
• Increasing awareness of who we are and what we do through digitisation and business intelligence.
• Knowing that we are doing our best.
• Increase and diversify our revenue streams to ensure a sustainable budget to deliver on current and future service requirements.

Our income is solely from voluntary donations, and as with all charities, we have been challenged by both the impact of the pandemic and the cost of living and their impact on our ability to fundraise. Income challenges remain and there is more work to be done to develop and diversify our income portfolio, along with ensuring an acceptable return on investment for all our activities.

Our Values and Behaviours

Fairness – we treat each other fairly and create a socially just organisation.

Inclusive – we create an environment where each individual can be their unique self.

Value – we value one another and ourselves.

Integrity – we are truthful and honest and extend trust to all.

Respect – we demonstrate respect for all and the contribution that we each make to the organisation.

Openness – we are approachable, genuine and authentic. We seek and encourage engagement and feedback.

Purpose – we are united and clear in our vision and our purpose. We know where we fit and all work towards our common goals.

Communication – we communicate in a relevant and appropriate way to keep all our stakeholders informed and engaged. We actively listen and hear to give everyone a voice.

Shared Values – we are clear what is expected of us and how we deliver. We live and uphold our shared values and behaviours.

Proud – we take pride in who we are and everything we do.

Deliver – we strive for excellence in all things and at all levels, both in service to others and to ourselves.

Assured – we do the right thing, in the right way at the right time.

Supportive – we support each other and all our stakeholders.

Care – we create a positive environment for all.

Appreciative – we recognise the value of every individual.

Ambition – we motivate ourselves and each other to succeed and recognise success.

Future Orientated – we greet each day with purpose, founded on an understanding of our future direction.

Collaboration – we connect with teams and individuals, openly and frequently.

Our values reflect who we want to be and how we do things. At our Charity we all take a personal responsibility to remain credible, genuine and consistent to these values. These six values are our foundation and support our vision and ambition for the future.