ABF FACTS:
The ABF helped 2600 individuals last year spending £2.2M doing so. In addition there were another 80 or so other charities that help our people that absorbed another £2.4M. The Fund gave over £200K to SSAFA for our (ABF) casework and another £100K for Norton House at Headley Court; The ABF started Help for Heroes (H4H) off with £50K at the beginning of their campaign; the Victory Services Club had £100K and the Royal Hospital (Chelsea) £500K.
The ABF :
- Are the strategic reserve for the whole Army in terms of welfare and benevolent funds.
- Are the strategic reserve for the Army Dependants’ Trust – and that when they see they might be running out we provide the top-up funds at once.
- Cover the whole spectrum of support – literally from the cradle to the grave and to emphasise that the youngest we help are babies and the oldest over 100.
- Are the Army’s enduring safety net and are still, and rightly, ‘the Army’s preferred charity’.
- Have been around for 64 years and there is no end to that in sight
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- The most important work we do is helping the needs of those thousands of individuals (our constituency for benevolence, and numbering 3300 last year) and the 80 or so other charities who help our people - but there is much more to it even than that.
- We help people of all ages from infants to the very elderly.
- We help with every kind of need imaginable. The spectrum of need is wide.
- We are the strategic reserve for all Corps and Regiments of the Army.
- We are the strategic reserve for the Army Dependants’ Trust (it supports, with an immediate grant, the next of kin of any soldier killed or who dies in-service from any cause).
- We are the Army’s enduring safety net; when all else fails, we are there. Day to day, and at the end of the day. Short, medium and long term.
- It is sad that words like experienced, dependable and reliable have somehow become ‘boring, old-fashioned and surrounded by cobwebs’ and that ‘safety net’ and ‘whole spectrum of help’ are somehow unexciting. We are proud of those characteristics and need to stress rather more that they are the very basis of what we are for the whole military community. All this enables our constituency not to worry.
LOCAL NEWS 2008
The picture shows the welfare minibus, presented to The Army Benevolent Fund (Cyprus), free and clear, by Andy's Motors Ltd, for the use of the troops and families of the current Resident Infantry Battalion, The 2nd Battalion The Duke of Lancasters Regiment, and to their successors, when they are replaced. This was by any standards a most generous gesture.
