Is anyone familiar with the charity Home Start?

dandy-candy

I have been looking for a volunteering job and in my area there is a charity called Home Start that needs more volunteers. The website looks interesting and they are very local to me but I haven't heard of them before. Does anyone have experience working with them? Can you give me an idea of what it entails? I have never done any volunteering before but I am keen to give my time to a charity.

Savvy_Sue

I haven't worked with them, but I have heard of them before, all good things!

lynsey85

i was supposed to get a homestart volunteer come out to me but havn't yet, my health visitor said it was someone that could come out for a short time a couple of times a week and wash up or put the washing on or mind the kids while i shower etc.

cte1111

I've had a Homestart volunteer to help me when I was suffering from depression and my DS was a baby.

Volunteers help families with young children (often with special needs from what the manager told me at the time). They come out regularly, say once or twice a week and give support, e.g. playing with the children so the Mum can get some washing done. They are not meant to do childcare or housework, it that makes sense but to help you so you can do it yourself.

If you've got the time and energy to work with Homestart, I would say do it, they were a big help to me although unfortunately only for a short time due to high demand.

Gleeful

Hmm. They only allow people with parenting experience to be a visiting volunteer.

That's squeezing out a lot of people with say teaching or nursery experience isn't it.

Home-Start_UK

Hi everyone above.

I’m going to answer as many of your questions as I can about Home-Start and how it works, and give you some pointers about where to get more information if you want it. Sorry if it is very long, but lots of points have been raised.

Home-Start is a family support charity. It’s all about parents helping other parents.

About volunteering
Volunteers provide practical and/or emotional support for families. The support is tailor-made to the needs of each family.

The only thing we insist on is that volunteers are parents or have full time caring responsibilities for children - like foster parents or step parents. This does exclude people who are teachers or nursery workers or social workers, but not yet parents. While these professional do bring considerable skills and knowledge to our help for families, the most important element of our volunteers’ support is that they know what it is like to look after a child 24/7, every week of the year, with little or no respite. People who work with children are able to switch off and go home at the end of their working day. Parents are not. It is this empathy between parents that is the most powerful thing about why our service works and has spread so far across the country. Parents who are struggling recognise and appreciate that another parent - one who has been there before – is giving their time freely to support a family that is struggling to cope.

Every volunteer is interviewed, references are taken up, and they are fully CRB checked. They are then given 40 hours of nationally accredited training over ten weeks. After they are matched with a family they are given regular, formal support and supervision by paid staff, and opportunities for ongoing training for the rest of their time with the charity.

Often, a Home-Start volunteer is able to support a family that will not open the door a social worker or someone more ‘official’.

About supporting families
We provide a volunteer for a family whenever we can, but if there are not enough people volunteering in any area, or if there a volunteers but not enough funding for them to be interviewed, trained, checked out and supported, then we are in the awful position of not being able to help families who need us.

Families are supported as long as there is one child under five/not at school yet. Parents are supported through any kind of situation – from isolation or bereavement, through disability, illness, mental health issues, divorce or through combinations of all these situations. When volunteers are much more experienced, they can be placed with families with multiple layers or problems such as drug or alcohol abuse, domestic violence, social exclusion and the difficulties that come with extreme poverty.

Support for families is completely confidential between the family and volunteer. This is the main element of our support for families. The ONLY time a volunteer is allowed (by Home-Start rules) to break this confidentiality, is when they suspect there is harm to the children of the family they are supporting, or to any parents classed as vulnerable adults. They are then required to report any suspicions.

A bit about Home-Start generally
The first local Home-Start was set up in 1973 in Leicester.
The network of local Home-Starts has grown since then. There are now 334 across the whole of the UK. Local people fund and set them up for their local communities because they value the benefits they bring to the local families who are supported, to people who volunteer as well and to the wider community.
There is also an organisation called Home-Start UK which supports all the local Home-Starts with business, charity and legal issues, training, quality assurance, national policies, etc. This allows the local Home-Starts to work to the same standards across the country, and to concentrate on supporting local families.

At the moment there are 16,000 volunteers who visit families at home for us each week.

2,000 more people volunteer throughout the year as trustees - they run each local Home-Start.

More information
The national website has stories from volunteers and families and lots more information. You can also find out where your nearest Home-Start is and how to contact them.

If you have further enquiries, you can contact us through the website. You can hear more from our volunteers, families and supporters on our Facebook site.or follow us on Twitter. (Sorry, am a new user on MSE forums, so can't put the links in).

Thanks for sticking with me this far through the information!

And, finally, thanks to the families, volunteers and supporters above who have talked honestly about their experiences of Home-Start support.

Savvy_Sue

Home-Start, you do need permission from MSE to post in this way, please take a look at the Forum Rules.

Former_MSE_Andrea

Hi

Just to let you know we're leaving Home-Start UK's post and that they are genuinely from Home Start.

Andrea