A pilot project to train family support volunteers to help families claim grants and benefits, is being made available across England, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

In April 2009 Home-Start UK teamed up with two other national charities, Turn2us (part of Elizabeth Finn Care) and the Child Poverty Action Group, to pilot and develop a project called Maximising Income for Families, funded by the Department of Education.

The aim was to help hundreds of families who were already being supported by Home-Start, to access financial support through benefits, tax credits and grants. The range of outcomes for families who took part in the pilot has been as varied as milk vouchers and grants for heating costs through to £210 per week extra income.

The Maximising Income project has led to significant improvements to the lives of Home-Start children too. One local Home-Start who is taking part in the project has been able to secure a grant to buy a three year old his own bed. The Home-Start coordinator said: “It was lovely to see and know that this child will have a proper bed of his own to sleep in tonight.”  

Currently £5 billion of tax credits go unclaimed and less than 3% of people are aware of charitable grants, despite the existence of over 3,500 charitable funds supporting people in poverty.

The results from the pilot project are still to be fully evaluated but because of imminent changes to the welfare system which will have an impact on many families supported by Home-Start, it is being made available to all 334 local Home-Starts across the UK.

This means that 35,000 families and over 73,000 children could benefit from the project in the future.

Julie Campbell, Home-Start UK project manager for Maximising Income said: “Major reform to the welfare system means that there has never been a more vital need to offer support to families in navigating the system. Many local Home-Starts already apply for ad hoc grants for their families. This project helps them find all the extra financial support they can in one place. An extra 16,000 volunteers will now be encouraged to take up the training and support Home-Start families. It is hoped that through the Maximising Income project thousands of families can be helped out of financial difficulty and the inevitable stress this places on family life.”

Twenty five local Home-Starts from across England took part in the pilot project, which involved training their volunteers to use the Turn2us website.

A Home-Start volunteer who has already supported her family through the project said: “The mum I support was delighted with her cooker as she had been feeding the children takeaways or giving them microwaveable meals. It felt good to have been able to help the family use the Turn2us website to secure a grant for such a necessary piece of equipment for the mum and her children.”

One mum supported by the project said: “It has helped me to more easily manage my spending for things that the children need. It was straightforward because my volunteer explained it to me in a way that I could understand.”

The training developed for these volunteers has recently gained Open College Network accreditation. Also, in a time when many charities are suffering cut backs in their funding, some local authority commissioners and funding bodies are now offering funding to these Home-Starts as they recognize the importance of this project in addressing the key priority of alleviating child poverty.

Home-Start is the UK’s leading family support charity. Through a network of 16,000 trained parent volunteers, families are offered emotional and practical support in their own homes. The only requirement for Home-Start support is that there must be at least one child under the age of five in the family. It is well known that children under five remain at greater risk of poverty than any other age group. Four million children currently live in poverty in the UK- one of the highest rates in Europe.


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Notes to Editor

Home-Start is the UK’s leading family support charity. We recruit and train volunteers to support parents, in their own homes, with at least one child under the age of five. Our home visiting work is unique in the UK. The charity was set up in 1973 and now has 334 Home-Starts supporting nearly 35,000 families and almost 73,000 children each year.  Almost 16,500 volunteers visit families in their own homes – parents supporting other parents in a variety of situations including isolation, bereavement, multiple births, poverty, lone parenting and illness and disability.  A full evaluation of the ‘Maximising Income’ pilot project will be completed by June 2011.

Turn2us
Turn2us, part of the charity Elizabeth Finn Care, offers a free, confidential and easy-to-use website – www.turn2us.org.uk – to help people in financial need access the money available to them through welfare benefits, charitable grants and other financial help. The Turn2us website contains a number of accessible, easy-to-use, tools, such as a benefits checker, grants search and Find an Adviser tool, together with other valuable resources to support volunteers and families, for example with managing money, finding out more about specific benefits and locating local specialist advisors for expertise on debt management and legal issues.


Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG)
CPAG is the leading charity campaigning for the abolition of child poverty in the UK and for a better deal for low-income families and children. CPAG has led the development and delivery of face to face training for Home-Start volunteers, and provided additional content for the Turn2us website and the online training for all participating Home-Start volunteers.

Available for interview:
Julie Campbell, Maximising Income project manager, Home-Start UK.

Case study (others available upon request)

Eleanor has a painful bone condition that limits her ability to be the mum she wants to be to her two young children. Her daughter has a rare illness, Cornelia de Lange Syndrome, and her husband is currently off sick from work following surgery. The family was struggling to make ends meet but their volunteer from Home-Start had been trained to support them to use the Turn2us website to maximise their income.
 
The result has been fantastic and the family discovered that they were entitled to claim housing benefit, council tax benefit and employment & support allowance. Eleanor says that she had never claimed benefits before and so did not know about the support her family were eligible to receive. In addition, her local council are also making major alterations to the family home, including installing a lift, that will mean that Eleanor can share that special time with her children when they go to bed, read them stories and tuck them in; something other parents take for granted.
 

Contact details:

Jo McLeish, Press and Pr Officer, Home-Start UK
Tel: 0116 2587933
Email: jmcleish@home-start.org.uk

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