Over the last 10 years, The Alfred Mizzi Foundation (TAMF) has been supporting the St Jeanne Antide Foundation (VO/005) with small annual grants in support of one or another of its core family support services. This year, TAMF has decided to step up its financial support to this social purpose NGO to enable it to sustain its current operations.

The St Jeanne Antide Foundation (SJAF) offers a range of free support services to very vulnerable and marginalised families at community level; some of its services are national in scope. SJAF does not duplicate services and works tirelessly to support family caregivers of mentally ill persons, survivors of domestic violence, vulnerable children and young people, and socially excluded persons and families sliding into poverty.

This year, SJAF will be recognising TAMF as one of its most generous and regular benefactors. This years’s TAMF grant to SJAF covers three years and comes at a time when NGO funding for service provision to vulnerable families is precarious and most funding opportunities force family welfare NGOs to squeeze the provision of holistic continuous services into the constraints of a project.

Thanks to TAMF, SJAF will enjoy some flexibility in 2018- 2020 to strategise and consolidate its current services while maintaining its standards of provision of holistic services to individuals and families who are experiencing very difficult life circumstances.

The SJAF team of workers and hundreds of families being supported are highly grateful to TAMF for the faith, trust, confidence and investment it has placed in the dedicated work that SJAF carries out among the most vulnerable in our communities. The TAMF investment in the social mission of the St Jeanne Antide Foundation is a unique example of a business-NGO partnership.

It is an example of corporate social responsibility at its best. Such a contribution leaves an NGO with less uncertainty, more job security for employees, and more time to concentrate on the real job of working with vulnerable persons and families towards their relief and self-empowerment with the skills and confidence that they need to cope with their distress, to access public services, and so on.