Our small team of professional volunteers (is that a thing?!) have been working alongside Sussex Police and as part of Lowland Rescue since 2003. In 2020 we responded to over 50 callouts by Sussex Police and neighbouring Lowland Rescue teams. Each year the cost of keeping the team operational rises. New technology has made the team safer and more efficient in recent years but with that comes additional costs. This Just Giving campaign has been setup by the team and will run throughout 2021 to help, and hopefully cover the costs of 'Keeping the show on the road' - keeping the team operational by covering the teams overheads and allowing us to concentrate on our core duties (saving lives) and less on background activities such as worrying about how we will pay for our core overheads. Ordinarily, the team raise funds throughout the year to cover these costs, attending many events and activities and supporting local causes. This has been extremely difficult to do, and in most cases impossible to do in the current times.

As an alternative, we are reaching out to the Just Giving community to help us.

In the interests of transparency, here are the itemised overheads that we are looking to raise funds for to cover in 2021.....

D4H Subscription

The team uses a cloud based software and application to help us manage our incidents, training and events. It serves as our central repository on training records, attendance and member details. The team pays a yearly fee of £450 for the service.

Insurance

Providing third-party and team member insurance for our activities. We currently pay approximately £400 a year for this.

Ofcom Radio License and data fees

The team operates a radio repeater station that is part of the national Lowland Rescue radio network. This site is currently hosted free of charge by Sussex Police but we do have to pay a yearly license fee to Ofcom of £150. In addition, we pay £13 a month for a 4G data connection to connect the site to the internet, so £144, and in total the repeater site costs the team just under £300 a year to maintain.

Text messaging fees

The team utilise a text messaging service called Twillio as a means to manage and communicate callouts to our team members. Each callout costs on average around £10. In 2020 we received over 50 callouts so this comes in at a rather hefty £500 annually.

First Responder kit maintenance and refresh

The team has a fully-equipped first-responser medical bag. This needs to be maintained and expired content refreshed on an annual basis. This also includes maintenance of an oxygen bottle. The cost for this is in the region of £600 annually.

Misc ad-hoc expenses

We always expect the unknown unknowns. Over the course of the year we encounter charges and costs that we didn't expect. This does vary year on year but we have put in £300 as a contingency for these eventualities.

So thats a grand total of around £2600 - and this is our fundraising target that we have set for our 'Keep the show on the road' Just Giving Campaign 2021. Can you help?!

About the team

Sussex is home to approximately 1.4 million people in an area of nearly 1 million acres. The local police services are tasked to find, care for and return to a place of safety anyone that is reported missing who is identified as vulnerable or at risk. Search Dogs Sussex support Sussex Police in fulfilling this obligation by providing emergency on-call nationally qualified search dog teams throughout Sussex and the UK to support the emergency services when looking for vulnerable missing people. We do this 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. We are the Lowland equivalent of Mountain Rescue.

More details can be found on our website: https://searchdogssussex.com