A three year grant totalling £266,000 from the Big Lottery Reaching Communities Fund has been secured by Home-Start Kennet. This money will help underwrite the continuation and expansion of the local charity’s work helping more families in the Devizes, Marlborough, Pewsey and Tidworth areas.
The grant will cover three-quarters of the funding the Home-Start Kennet needs to carry on and grow its work until 2016. The trustees have made a point of thanking all those who have helped it financially since the loss of its prime funding grant from Wiltshire Council in March 2012.
And they point out that fundraising will have to continue to raise the other one quarter of the annual costs of their new programme and to meet the Big Lottery’s requirement to match part of their grant.
Bel Crompton, the Home-Start Kennet Scheme Manager, told Marlborough News Online: “We are so pleased to receive this Big Lottery award. It is great that a significant funding body recognises and values Home-Start Kennet’s support for Wiltshire families.”
“Our charity’s trustees and staff can now plan for the next three years, supporting more local families as we expand our team of home-visiting volunteers.”
Home-Start Kennet is a local charity that has been supporting families with young children in the area for twenty-five years – including young military families. It provides a very special service: volunteers, who are all parents themselves, are professionally trained to help families under stress.
The volunteers visit the family at their home to give support in parenting strategies, stimulating play for children, accessing local services, family budgeting – or sometimes simply by providing a skilled listening ear when problems need sharing, lessening feelings of isolation.
Last year fifty-one families were supported and the charity currently has thirty home-visiting volunteers. Each family costs the charity between £1,500 and £1,800 a year to support.
Home-Start Kennet has a very small team of part-time staff and the new funding will allow two additional part-time appointments to be made to manage the increasing case-load.
For several years two-thirds of Home-Start Kennet’s running costs were met by Wiltshire Council to the tune of £50,000 a year. The rest of the costs were covered by money raised from donations and grant making bodies.
In March 2011 the contract for the work the Council referred to Home-Start Kennet was cancelled – though the Council did provide a £25,000 grant for 2011-2012 – after that Wiltshire Council’s major funding for Home-Start Kennet ended. The Council’s move was a policy decision to concentrate their reduced resources onto the needs of complex family situations. Home-Start Kennet’s aim is to help families before they become ‘complex cases’.
Home-Start Kennet is affiliated to Home-Start UK which provides guidance, governance and advice, but no financial support.
Home-Start Kennet has a new office phone number: 01672 569457. This is the number for people to contact who might benefit from this kind of support or want to become a volunteer. Or they can be emailed at homestartkennet.a@btconnect.com.
There are more details on the charity’s new website.
