What is the vision of your Organisation?
Home-Start Elmbridge wants to see a society in which every parent has the support they need to give their children the best possible start in life. We work with families with a child predominately under five in the Borough of Elmbridge, where families have a need and would benefit from weekly volunteer support, group support, specialised 1:1support and support for parents/carers of children through primary school.
Why has your Organisation signed the ‘End Poverty Pledge’?
Poverty is complex.It affects every aspect of a child’s life – from health and education to emotional wellbeing. We are an organisation committed to doing what we can to support families in financial hardship and Elmbridge is a particularly difficult area to live in if you are in this position.
What examples can you give of your Organisation putting the ‘End Poverty Pledge’ into practice?
We support families where children are undergoing or have diagnosis for disabilities with completing Disability Living Allowance (DLA) applications, ensuring children with disabilities receive the support they deserve. To enable the families to receive the emotional support they require without additional financial burden, transport is provided along with free snacks for the children and hot drinks for the parents/carers.
We offer free parenting courses, helping caregivers build strong, nurturing homes and run cooking sessions, teaching families how to prepare affordable, nutritious meals. Again with the help of Walton Charities we are able to ensure any transport or refreshments are provided free of charge when required.
We connect families to essential resources like the Eco Hub, Walton Charities pop-up uniform shop, Stripey Stork, Lower Green inclusive café and food abnk and The Bridge community food bank.
We help secure household items through John Bean applications, and we work with SGN to tackle fuel poverty, ensuring families stay warm and safe.
We partner with Surrey County Council to promote smoke-free environments, not only from protecting children’s health from the start but reducing the weekly cost of smoking.
What would you hope to be able to do more of in the longer term?
Continue to collaborate with charities such as Walton Charities, Lower Green Community Centre, Surgeons, The Eco Hub, Vital Village. Building on this we would look to build further connections, especially as the local community centres begin to open up for families in Elmbridge.
We would like to utilise some of the End Poverty Pledge resources, such as delivering the Poverty Awareness training with our volunteers, to ensure that we are supporting our families in the best way possible.
Encourage users to work with Walton Charities on The Elmbridge Poverty Forum.
As an organisation we meet many families impacted by poverty and work to enable positive change through budgeting courses and working with others to provide essentials.