Staff, volunteers and families at Home Start Suffolk Coastal are thrilled today to hear that they have been awarded a Big Lottery grant  totalling £362,637!  This money has been provided as part-funding for the scheme over 3 years to extend its services within Suffolk Coastal.

Home-Start recruits and trains parent volunteers to support families , struggling to cope, within  their own homes, offering non-judgmental, practical and emotional support for a wide range of issues  including domestic abuse, multiple births, isolation, depression, bereavement and lone families. Family support groups are another part of the scheme, offering a nurturing environment for families to grow together. The effect of any intervention at an early stage in childrens’ lives  is magnified – and lasts a lifetime!

Tara Somers,  the Hone-Start Suffolk Coastal Senior Co-ordinator “couldn’t be more delighted! The money is for our Empowering Families project  – and will allow us to reach more local families for whom too often life feels like an uphill struggle. In the current economic climate, this is particularly important!”

The grant will enable Tara and her team  to set up a new Family Group in Woodbridge, and increase Home Start services throughout our area, which stretches northwards  from Felixstowe , as far as Leiston and beyond.

Home-Start Suffolk Coastal is part of the UK’s leading family support charity, Home-Start UK which supports nearly 35,000 families and almost 73,000 children each year.  More than 16,000 volunteers visit families in their own homes – parents supporting other parents in a variety of situations including isolation, bereavement, multiple births, illness or disability.

Since opening in Woodbridge in 1999, Home-Start Suffolk Coastal has supported 530 families, many in very challlenging circumstances. In the last year alone, their 45 volunteers spent a massive 17,000 hours supporting 84 families and 181 children.

Home-Start Suffolk Coastal  has already been part of a pilot, “Maximising Income”, helping families who already supported by Home-Start, to access necessary financial support  (And let me tell you, this is very very necessary: it took me and my daughter and my husband three full weeks of headscratching and together to  complete a Disability Living Allowance form). With the help of the Lottery grant, 60 more Home-Start families will be supported in accessing benefits and grants they are entitled to. Major reform to the welfare system means that there has never been a more vital need to offer support to families in navigating the system

“I really don’t know what I would have done without Home-Start, my volunteer was exactly what I needed, a friend, someone to talk to, someone that’s been there. My volunteer has given me the confidence to go out, and do what a ‘normal’ mum can do”