Press Releases
£250,000 grant from DCSF for recession-hit families supported by Home-Start
3rd December 2009
Home-Start, the UK’s leading family support charity has been given a £250,000 grant to distribute to 25 local Home-Starts who are working directly with families affected by the recession.
The recession has seen some Home-Starts get triple the amount of families asking for help than they would normally have, with ‘emotional support’ being one of the main causes of concern. With the grant, Home-Start will be working directly with these families.
The grant will enable Home-Start to provide extra family support up until the end of March 2010. By this time, up to 330 families and approximately 800 children will have received Home-Start home-visiting support focused on enabling them to cope with some of the difficulties brought about for them by the recession. Support offered to these families will include:
• Volunteers will be encouraged to develop creative ways of helping families affected by the recession for example, providing helpful materials to show ‘healthy eating on a shoestring’, cheaper ways to entertain your children’.
• Volunteers will also be providing additional emotional support to families who have seen an increase in anxiety, depression and stress caused by the recession.
• Sign posting families to other agencies who work with families struggling to cope with their finances.
These will then be shared with other Home-Start schemes across the UK, directly benefitting the thousands of families Home-Start supports on a national level.
Kay Bews, Chief Executive, Home-Start UK, said: “This is fantastic news for us. Not only do some of the most vulnerable families in our community gain much-needed support, but our existing trained parent volunteers will have gained greater understanding of the difficulties brought about by redundancy, reductions in income and other changing family circumstances.”
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National Contact:
Jo McLeish, press and pr officer, Home-Start UK
T: 0116 2587933, e; jmcleish@home-start.org.uk
www.home-start.org.uk
Case study and Home-Start spokesperson available upon request
Notes to Editors:
Home-Start is the UK’s leading family support charity. We recruit and train volunteers to support parents 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 336 Home-Starts supporting nearly 34,000 families and over 71,000 children each year. Almost 16,000 volunteers visit families in their own homes – parents supporting other parents in a variety of situations including isolation, bereavement, multiple births, illness or disability.
