We are enjoying a surge in memberships and increasingly better awareness by the public and the medical profession. This is in the main due to much better income levels, giving LUPUS UK the chance to publish many more leaflets, posters, bookmarks and other items. These are also sent out frequently to the members at no charge, and especially for Awareness Week which is always the second week in April every year.
The Head Office of the charity now employs six people, of whom just two are full-time workers. Our 25 Regional Groups and Committees provide good support across the country in conjunction with the work of Head Office. As always, finding new members for these Committees is not easy, and the more willing volunteers have lupus which can sometimes be limiting despite the best efforts.
Sales of sweatshirts, pens, umbrellas, baseball caps, Christmas cards and much more has been very successful. Everything that is produced carries the LUPUS UK logo and the cards have a brief description of our work - 60,000 sold in 1995, good publicity plus a welcome profit. We are soon to introduce packs of notelets for members, are always looking at fresh ideas for sales, and the National Draw realised over £20,000 last year.
A positive appeals policy has been very successful, and has brought in considerable funds for 1995 - it would be hard to imagine life without our appeals activities, and every national lupus group should put an appeals officer in place, perhaps on a volunteer basis to start. Local groups would also benefit from appointing an appeals officer for their immediate area - even reading an appeal letter explaining lupus will get the recipient thinking.
LUPUS UK hopes to set up two or three more Regional Groups during 1996 in areas where we are not represented, and will need to put in place a stronger system to reach the sufferer in the larger cities of the UK, but especially London.
We hope to produce a first video on lupus, and have plans to publish a clinical guide to the illness for every doctor in the country -that's around 40,000, and the costs will be enormous. Our Appeals Officer will be working on that, but if the project gets an earlier diagnosis of lupus for sufferers it will all have been very worthwhile.
Brian Hanner
E. L. E. F.
European Lupus Erythematosus Federation