Home-Start Slough
Key Facts
Location
Project Criteria
Contact
Janine Edwards
Email
Project funding
£115,458
Funding round
Home-Start Slough supports parents who are disadvantaged and have at least one child aged 5 or less. The disadvantages suffered by these parents include financial deprivation, social isolation, mental illness, physical disability, domestic violence, lack of parenting skills and more. The scheme recruits, trains and supervises volunteers who visit the parents' homes regularly to provide support both practical and emotional. Our ethos is about empowering the individual to make changes to deal with their difficulties rather than create dependency. We visit individuals in their own homes, thus reaching those parents who are "hard to reach". Our volunteers span all age groups, thus promoting improved parental confidence through intergenerational activity. We actively apply the principles of Every Child Matters, encourage the use of local services and operate a weekly Family Support Group (FSG) to enable us to achieve our objectives.
With the support of the Parenting Fund, We plan to expand our existing service by 40% and to increase the collaborative work that is needed to support hard to reach parents, such as the "newly arrived", substance/alcohol misusers, victims of domestic abuse, and those with significant mental health problems. We will fund 2 part time Organisers in addition to our Family Support Group (FSG) for 2 years. The Organisers will recruit weekly visiting volunteers whose aim is to prevent family breakdown becoming a crisis. The volunteer will encourage the family to use other services and resources to increase independence and reduce isolation. The parents and children will thus become more secure and confident in themselves and the future. Improvement in parenting skills will also be an achieved outcome in addition to healthy eating, improved access to immunisation and safeguarding of children. Our FSG will provide a mechanism to support parents that need additional encouragement or provide a bridge following weekly support, enabling the parents to become fully reliant on their own network and existing services.
This funding will mean that we will provide support to an additional 55 families and over 150 more children would benefit in improved parenting.