Working with families to provide smart solutions in tough times

The work of Home Start is a perfect example of how voluntary and community organisations are offering effective, efficient and valuable services to communities and we encourage other groups to share their own examples of smart solutions.

Home-Start makes a difference

Home-Starts team of 900 dedicated volunteers work with over 3,000 children in Northern Ireland each year. These volunteers give more than £2million pounds worth of work to the Northern Ireland economy each year.

Home-Start’s volunteers are all highly skilled and experienced people who work with families who, for whatever reason, aren’t getting the help they need.  Home-Start turns fragile families into strong families and lets vulnerable children become happy, safe children. If families crumble, communities disintegrate and children suffer. They do this through giving children the opportunity to thrive through learning and achieving.  Home-Starts work is also about families and they focus on  making better parents for tomorrow by supporting families to make better use of local services so they feel less isolated and have wider horizons.

Social services, schools and other agencies refer families to Home-Start for a variety of reasons including child protection, mental health, disabilities, drug and alcohol misuse, multiple births, deprivation and hardship and domestic violence.  Home-Start focuses on preventing problems before they become insurmountable and very often they are a families’ last chance. 

It is economically more cost effective to use Home-Start to provide support early on than to offer more costly services at later stage. It costs £1134 to provide Home-Start support to a family for a year and Homestart can support 40 children living at home for the cost of taking one child into care. Every £1 spent on Home-Start UK is through leverage of funding turned into £10 of local funding to help schemes work to support families.

Read the full case study at www.communityni.org/news/home-start-provides-smart-solutions-tough-times

If you are delivering Smart Solutions in Tough Times then we also want to showcase your work, so tell us what you're doing and tell others.

NICVA will highlight the work being done by the voluntary and community sector to help ensure that vulnerable and disadvantaged people, families and communities continue to receive the services they need and the hard work done to build up communities does not start to unravel due to difficult financial pressures.

Learn more about Smart Solutions in Tough Times.