25 April 2024
Statement from CEO Diarmaid Ó Corrbuí
I am delighted to be launching Carmichael’s 2023 Annual Report.
The publication of the organisation’s annual report is a very important event. It is the organisation’s accountability statement to its stakeholders, its funders, staff, volunteers, service users, supports, regulators and the wider public.
The 2023 Annual Report sets out our purpose, strategic objectives, services, governance arrangements, our funding sources and what we did with those funds and resources in delivering on our purpose, our objectives and targets set in our strategic plan.
There are a lot of achievements by the Carmichael team in 2023 that I am very proud of. These include;
- Carmichael was home to 44 different nonprofit organisations.
- 3,679 people were supported through our training and support services. In 2023, we expanded our range of training programmes and eLearning modules. We also saw growing demand for our board evaluation and governance review services.
- Our mentoring programme continues to go from strength to strength. In 2023 we had a record number of 53 CEOs and managers of nonprofit organisations that were assigned a mentor under the programme which is delivered free of charge thanks to the pro bono support of our 60+ mentors.
- We provided 189 informal supports/guidance to 871 people from 271 organisations and networks.
- We had 833 meeting room bookings and with the appointment of our new chef, Jeff we have substantially enhanced our catering offer for meetings.
- We had 134 entries and more than 200 people attended our 2023 Good Governance Awards event.
- In partnership with TU Dublin, we were delighted to launch the Certified Charity Trustee programme which we will be running again in 2024.
Like many nonprofits, 2023 was not all plain sailing and we experienced higher staff and operating costs in 2023. The board also made the strategic decision to significantly enhance our communications capacity by creating a new post of Communications Officer. We also had some building issues which meant that some of our meeting rooms and offices we not available. The net effect of these was that we incurred an overall deficit of €78,000 which will be funded from our reserves.
Overall, it was a very strong year for the delivery of our services and meeting our strategic targets, but our expenditure was greater than the income we were earning and received from our statutory funders. Our challenge for 2024 is to continue to grow and expand our services and carefully manage our expenditure to reduce the size of our operating deficit and work to a breakeven position in 2025.
I want to thank the Board of Carmichael for their supportive guidance and governance oversight. A big thank you to the team in Carmichael, our staff and volunteers and all those who support us with the Good Governance Awards and the mentoring programme, our funders and supporters and especially, the thousands of people from the sector that use our services and supports every year.
Diarmaid Ó Corrbuí
CEO
Carmichael
4 North Brunswick Street, Dublin, D07 RHA8
Tel: 01 873 5702
