President of the Dominica Cancer Society (DCS), Yvonne Alexander, believes that the Covid-19 pandemic will present economic and financial implications for the Society in the future.
Alexander made the statement during a live interview with Leroy ‘Wadix’ Charles on his Creole show on State-Owned Radio DBS on Friday night.
“COVID has just begun to affect us over the last two months or so, but we recognize that going forward in the future, that there will be economic and financial implications for the Dominica Cancer Society,” she said.
According to Alexander, one of the main areas of focus is soliciting financial assistance from everybody who is willing to give, “and so we recognize that in the future funding will be much more limited because of the fact that we are all anticipating that the offset of COVID will result in a downturn in the economy.”
She said currently, the Society does have funds and continues to provide assistance to individuals.
“We are able to meet the cost of our admin, keeping our office functional, pay our office rent and our utilities and for this, we are grateful to the government of Dominica from whom we do receive a subvention that assists us in meeting our day-to-day operational cost,” Alexander revealed.
Meantime, she said the DCS Board of Directors are currently discussing its plans for the rest of the year since there were activities that were already being planned.
“We were already putting together our calendar of activities and what we are recognizing is, we have had the scale back,” Alexander stated. “We are not too quite sure if the main fundraising event will take place since there is still a lot of uncertainty in relation to the COVID situation.”
She said the DCS Board will discuss the society’s calendar of activities at a meeting next week.
Alexander said Covid-19 will definitely be a challenge for the DCS as they continue to plan.
She mentioned for instance, that the month of June is recognized as Cancer Survivors Month, “It’s a month when we celebrate the fact that we have survived probably another year of being cancer-free and normally, we do that with a candlelight service, a service of hope.”
Alexander continued, “By now we would have commenced preparations for this activity and at this point in time we are not quite sure whether we are going to be able to proceed with it.”
She said currently the DCS office remains closed, but the staff continues to work from home and they are available throughout the day to take whatever request that people have.
Alexander is encouraging individuals to contact the society, preferably via e-mail and telephone that have been disseminated, to avoid too much personal contact.
Also, they are being advised to do whatever is necessary to keep themselves safe and healthy both emotionally and physically.
“Some of us are beginning to breathe a sigh of relief, even while we are mindful that we don’t let our guards down,” Alexander remarked.
She encouraged members of the Society and other members in the public to wear a mask whenever they go out.
As usual, this is simple another opportunity to beg people for money.
You all can hardly wait for another hurricane to blow through and, tear up the island, so that you can cry crocodile tears until the donated money start rolling in.
We did not get any destructive hurricane last year, and there was no windfall of donated money that one could have grin their teeth over and cram their pockets; so now they hope to capitalized on this deadly disease COVID-19.
Trouble is it is pandemic, it’s all over the universe, had it been an epidemic in Dominica, maybe, just maybe some free money would start flowing into Dominica.
Sorry, not this time around, the ‘freebies,’ the free money that you all crave, will not come.
Anybody who anticipates that, is looking for blood money!