3 Rossmore Road, London NW1 6NJ

The Manager AND cO-ORDINATOR ReportS

For home-Start Westminster

Board of Trustees Meeting to be held

Wednesday16stMay2012Christa Scholtz –

Congratulations to all of us for being awarded Charity of the Year in Westminster for the 2nd year running. If I think of the charities we are up against, that is no small achievement. The new volunteer broker indicated that we were very much the bench mark for the voluntary sector in Westminster.

End of Year Figures, 2011-12

Families supported: 184

Children: 353

Volunteers: 93

Service Delivery: Families

No. of families: / March 12 / April 12 / May 12
Currently being supported
(as of the 1st of the month) / 88 / 89 / tbc
Matched / 6 / 8 / tbc
Closed / 5 / 5 / tbc
New referrals / 14 / 24 / tbc
Waiting for a volunteer / 20 / 29 / tbc
HS-UK annual target / 120
Actual to date (Apr-Dec 2011) / 97

Families:

We are receiving above average referrals and they are much more complex. People are desperate about their housing situation and the anxiety is crippling people’s ability to cope and having a very negative effect on their health. For the team it is going to be a balancing act between supporting the families and the very onerous monitoring and evaluation that we will have to do this year above and beyond MESH. We are going to have to prove our value to Westminster by doing the very complex quarterly monitoring form and they will train one of us on eStart which is similar to MESH. The up side of this is that if we do it carefully it will actually begin to capture our work more completely, but until we do all of this it is hard to say how we will manage. We have all worked very hard to streamline this side of the work as much as possible and will keep doing that, but it remains a lot of work.

Volunteers:

We have just started our first Prep course of the year and our numbers are slightly down from our last course. At present we have 14 volunteers. In comparison to the last two groups, this is a very different group of people and we will need to see how government legislation on benefits is going to affect our numbers. We do get volunteers calling and telling us that we are highly recommended by the people who refer them to us.

CRB Checks

I am going to take this offthe report for the future, unless there are more changes.

Service in general

My time has been taken up with recruiting and with keeping track of the changing climate. I have done some Data Protection Training that we need to be eligible for future Health Funding. Key points:

  1. Contracting processes are weak and poorly understood by both commissioners and providers, particularly with regards to the commissioner requiring details of service users and what happens to the data at the end of the contract
  2. Consenting processes are weak, particularly with regards to potential information sharing and Privacy Notices
  3. Basic security standards are not being met universally – this is a risk to service users, the organisations and the consortia of which they are members

I was also invited to join Valens the Family and Children Consortium that will cover the Tri-borough. As we are members of DESTA this will be a much easier process. I have learnt an enormous amount about consortium work by going to the training and meetings and the training is of a much higher standard than we get from VAW in general. Although we pulled out of the consortium organised by VAW it was with the view that we are open to join if they get their act together. We were asked by the Westminster Society if we would come back if they took the lead. In principle I agreed. When the tenders come out we can decide who we think will be the strongest consortia to work with.

I am still involved in the BLF Housing Resettlement consortia bid and we are completing the 2nd stage of this.

This is a very challenging time for us in managing the end of year reports and still managing our case load as we are receiving such a high level of referrals. Once our new member of staff joins us we are hoping to have a session with Gillie to have another look at how we organise ourselves. Organisation is a key to us staying on top of things and looking at how we best use everyone’s skills and time.

Early Years Champions

I attended the meeting on the 3rd of May. I am really glad that I am going to these meetings as they are informing our work and the way forward. The information that I receive from this group is invaluable and it keeps us at the forefront of the early intervention/preventative agenda.

In June There will be a meeting in Westminster onPrimary Prevention - cheaper than cure, better outcomes for children. There are many influential keynote speakers attending.

Best Start Project – Working Group update:

This project builds on our Best Start Bid and really has been in development since the badly managed and designed ‘Right from the Start’ research. The Early Learning Partnership Project also gave us a lot of material and training for our volunteers to drive the preventative agenda. Parents as the first teachers of their children issomething we have developed over time and therefore all our volunteers have had some training around attachment theory.

We want to design a project based on a proven model that will enable HSW to use its existing strengths to assist the statutory bodies in the delivery of its early intervention strategies. The program will aim to have measurable outcomes. The working party has looked at several of the best international projects as highlighted by the WAVE trust. They are FNP, Leksand Parenting approach, Community Mothers and NCT. The closest model to HSW is the Community mothers. We aim to target 5-6 outcomes i.e. Breastfeeding, Obesity (a Westminster target) Immunisation, Increase well-being and Fathers’ involvement. This is still a work in progress. The working group has done some excellent work and we are making valuable contacts and getting really good information to take this idea forward. To our knowledge there is no other organisation in the tri-borough delivering this kind of auxiliary support for midwives and health visitors.

Events with Families

Science Museum

We had a hugely successful trip to the Science Museum (a big thank you to Gillie for putting us in contact with them!). We had one of the workers take us around as well as our own private ‘Star is Born’ session which was a big hit! It really made all of the difference to have this support from the museum and was a good introduction to this free service for our families, many of whom did not even know that it existed before. We will look to cultivate this relationship with the SM further. If anybody has any ideas on how to do this then please let staff know.

Easter Egg Hunt

Our Easter egg hunt took place in Regents Park with approximately 15 families attending. One mother fed back to staff that she would not be able to attend such events without support and that her life had been completely changed by HSW and her volunteer. Lots of Easter Eggs and sack races/egg and spoon races later we were all suitably exhausted!

Home-Start Westminster – registered charity 1091756

Tel: 020 7724 1345 Fax: 020 7724 1349

Email: