Contact a Family - Major
Key Facts
Location
Project Criteria
Project funding
£168,935
Funding round
Contact a Family is a national charity established in 1979. We provide advice, information, support and contact with other families to the parents and families of disabled children.
We have a free phone helpline for families with disabled children and offer advice, information and support to parents during the difficult period following diagnosis. Over 27,000 children are born or diagnosed with a disability each year in the UK. Currently our advice and information reaches two thirds of their parents. Our ambition through this project is to reach all of them with a particular focus on Black and Ethnic minority families and others that may be hard to reach.
To increase the reach of our helpline, a new Parent Adviser is being recruited to do outreach work with fathers, black and minority ethnic families and other hard to reach groups. The adviser will also work with our Asian Parent volunteers to make sure that information gets out to Asian families.
Other work in the project includes:
- expanding the interpreting services that will be needed on the helpline following wider promotion of it in the ethnic press
- our guide for parents whose children are newly diagnosed will be translated into four more languages following a successful trial last year of the publication in Gujarati
- a publicity poster featuring multi cultural images of dads will be produced and distributed widely
- a new leaflet promoting our linking service that puts families facing similar challenges in touch with one another
- our 'Group Action Pack', a guide to setting up and running a parents' support group, will be extended to include the topics of 'Involving hard to reach groups' and 'Equal opportunities working with BME communities'.