2026 Status & Outlook

Hello to our treasured Bridges & Balm community! In this post, we summarize our 2025 financial and assistance metrics, review our current financial status, outline our new initiatives and provide some BoD updates.

First, thank you for your incredible care for survivors and former workers through your emotional and financial support. Your support for them over the past two years has been truly overwhelming, and it’s amazing that we are now beginning our third year of operation. Thank you!

2025 Summary

What a wonderful year 2025 was! Thanks to our donors, Bridges & Balm received over $419,000 in donations in 2025. We ended the year with a  $135,000 account balance which has been carried over into 2026. Donations during our December Holiday Funding Initiative far exceeded our goal, raising $120,000, including $21,000 in matching funds. Thanks to all of our donors for your incredible generosity and compassion!

From the assistance perspective, we funded 25 transitioning and resting workers and 35 survivors for a total of over $310,000 for worker assistance in 2025. Of that total, 61.4% went for support of former workers and 38.6% was used for survivor support. We provide assistance to  former workers and survivors on nearly every continent including Asia, Australia, UK/Europe and the Americas. Our 2025 operations expenses totaled a little over $15,000, or 4.86% of donations, over half which were for credit card charges. For the most recent detailed charts showing recent monthly expenditures and donations, please see the Funds Overview and Activity page of the Bridges & Balm website.

2026 Assistance and Support Progress Update

As of March 2026, we are assisting 41 survivors and 27 resting/transitioning workers and disbursing an average of over $32,000 per month in assistance. Assistance requests for survivors have leveled off over the past few months due to other charities increasing their reach and the cyclical nature of survivors coming forward, but we and P2HN (Pathways to Healing Network - our onboarding partner) expect them to increase soon due to a variety of factors discussed in further detail below. New resting/transitioning worker assistance requests are coming in at a rate of 2-3 per month, which is an increase over our 2025 average. We expect this request rate to remain at current levels or increase during 2026 and beyond due to the large population of older former workers, increasing percentages of older active workers, and the increased visibility, comfort level, and trust in Bridges & Balm as an assistance partner. 

The Evolving Charity & Support Organization Landscape

We continue to collaborate closely with other charities that support survivors. P2HN onboards many survivors and utilizes therapy funding from a group of survivor charities, including United Open Arms (UOA), Renewal North (Canada) and Bridges & Balm, which helps to spread survivor therapy across multiple funding sources. There also are regional funds in the Pacific Northwest (ORSID & WANIDAK) that provide therapy funding for survivors in their regions. 

Occasionally, survivor charities and survivor support organizations change their policies or decide to discontinue operations. Whenever this occurs, we stand ready to continue to fund the services that they were provided by those organizations whenever possible. For example, we recently collaborated with Voices for the Truth to assume responsibility for the RAINN Survivor hotline, which has a dedicated number and specific trained responders for our survivor community. In situations where another charity’s policies limit or end survivor therapy after a period of time, we will assume the therapy costs whenever possible, usually without any gap in therapy. We strive to collaborate with other organizations in times of change so any disruptions in services can be avoided. 

Bridges & Balm Organizational Updates

Bridges & Balm is no stranger to change either! Over the past six months, we’ve had some personnel changes and additions in our Officer ranks and Board of Directors.

• Eric Miller has left the Vice President position and the Board of Directors. We are very thankful for Eric’s dedication and contributions to Bridges & Balm. Thank you Eric!

• Laura Stack has been elected to the Vice President position and will help manage several of the 2026 Initiatives. Laura is also a key member of the worker committee that processes incoming resting and transitioning worker requests.

• Steve Paddon has taken the additional role of Policy and Process Optimization Director. Defining and optimizing our policies and processes are critical to scaling our operations as we extend our capabilities and scope. Steve is already the Bridges & Balm Secretary, de facto spokesperson, and oversees the Worker Committee operations and will continue in those positions.

• Thomas Sikes has assumed the role of our Operations Technology Director. Tom is focused on helping us define, acquire/develop and adopt technology to help us automate our operations.

• Sara Sikes has accepted the role of bookkeeper for Bridges and Balm. She is responsible for therapy invoice processing and payment, worker payments and general bookkeeping. This is a paid contractor position as these activities are intensive, ongoing, and critical to our operations. These activities were previously all performed by Paul Svendsen and became too labor-intensive for one person to manage.  We gratefully thank Paul for performing the function as bookkeeper over the past two years.

In addition, we have added three new directors to our Board of Directors. Please see the Who We Are heading on our website to see the BoD updates and meet the new members of our BoD.

These changes and new positions are all designed to enable Bridges & Balm to scale to meet the increasing needs of our worker and survivor community without burning out our officers, BoD and treasured team members. Rest assured that all positions are still volunteer and uncompensated except for the bookkeeper, which we contract out due to the intensive, ongoing time and energy required.

Building for the Long Term 

It is also important to mention that we are building Bridges & Balm to be relevant for the long term. It’s increasingly clear that the financial and emotional needs of former workers and survivors are not going away anytime soon. Therefore, Bridges & Balm must be built to survive and thrive through challenges, personnel changes, and varying economic conditions. We can only accomplish this by continuing to observe strict operational policies and financial transparency, enforcing personal privacy, and by continually bringing new people into the organization. In fact, our bylaws require that we limit the terms of our officers and BoD to bring in different strengths and perspectives. So change is an operational necessity at Bridges & Balm, and we embrace transitions in the officer or BoD ranks. This is a very healthy process as Bridges & Balm is bigger than any individual or group of individuals.

2026 Initiatives

Our efforts in 2026 will be focused on improvements in extending our international reach and improving support for the former worker community.

• International website support: Sexual and spiritual abuse in our fellowship community are just as prevalent in other parts of the world as they are in North America. We are working with regional groups in other parts of the world including UK/Ireland, mainland Europe, and South Africa to provide dedicated landing pages on the Bridges & Balm website so they can serve their populations with localized language and messaging. We are also planning upgrades to the donate page to support donations on other currencies and other international improvements.

• Extensions to worker assistance: Bridges & Balm will soon offer the ability to migrate individual worker cell phone and internet access plans to a Bridges & Balm “corporate” account (AT&T). Many resting/transitioning workers subscribe to individual cell and internet plans with minimal features that are often expensive and restrictive. There are several other similar worker assistance extensions that we hope to offer in 2026.

• Planning for Long Term Care: Our initial focus is always to augment former workers’ income to provide a basic living assistance. We are extending this monthly budget discussion to now include long term care assessment and planning so we can better anticipate and accommodate their needs when they can no longer work. This also includes acquiring or creating case management tools so we can document and track long term care scenarios.

• Other 2026 projects focus on improving the scalability and resilience of our operations. These are mostly internal projects that aren’t visible from the outside but help us to reduce workload and increase our operational efficiency. 

As you can see, we have a full slate of exciting activities and initiatives planned for the rest of 2026. If you would like to be part of our team and have skills in event planning and coordination, writing, or social networking, please contact us via the “Contact Us” link at the bottom of every web page or send us an email at bridgesandbalm@gmail.com. We are adding a “Skills Needed” page on our website to see if your skills match our needs so please stay tuned. We can promise you a rewarding experience and your skills will have a huge impact on bettering the lives of many. 

We are grateful for you and to be a part of Bridges & Balm and we thank you for your love and care for the most vulnerable amongst us.