What is the vision of your Organisation?
Our vision is to have “an Elmbridge community where everyone has the opportunity and support to live a rewarding life, free from poverty and inequality”.
Why has your Organisation signed the ‘End Poverty Pledge’?
We are proud to have joined the End Poverty Pledge. Elmbridge is one of the most unequal boroughs in the country, and we welcome the opportunity to review what more we can do both as an organisation, and as part of a collective movement, to support local people.
What examples can you give of your Organisation putting the ‘End Poverty Pledge’ into practice?
In our strategic priorities we write that one of our priorities is to “raise awareness of and engage our community in the local issues of poverty and inequality”, and our second priority is to “work with our partners to reduce the causes and symptoms of child poverty in Elmbridge”.
Alongside our annual impact report, we also conduct evaluations of services including our individual grants programme, pilot project The Bridge, alongside client surveys of Walton & Hersham Foodbank. We use this feedback to make changes and help shape our future policies and services.
We are a Living Wage Employer and Living Wage Funder.
We are part of a wider network of organisations that is working together to tackle poverty in Surrey. We often facilitate this network through our grant giving programme, and we often work collaboratively with a range of organisations to tackle poverty. We host support services in The Bridge, for example. Also, we are on steering groups that bring together local organisations with the aim of tackling either a specific area of poverty or poverty in general.
Our signposting abilities are strong, and we are often considered a central organisation in signposting others to additional support. We also work closely with a lot of referral agencies that can signpost to us and vice versa.
We also have the online support directory which is updated regularly and contains relevant links to other organisations that people can access.
What would you hope to be able to do more of in the longer term?
We would be open to providing training about the challenges facing people in financial hardship and and how to minimise these with our staff, volunteers and partners.
We will explore how we can monitor services outcomes for users on lower incomes and other disadvantaged groups.
When setting up a new project or initiative, we will look to consider the impact it is likely to have on service users who are in, or at risk of, poverty.
”Having so many civic and charitable organisations from across the borough join already – with many more exploring doing so – serves to reiterate just how committed our community is to tackling poverty and inequality.”