Home-Start looking for parents to support parents

Calling all Hounslow borough residents with parenting experience and a couple of spare hours a week: local families need you!

Home-Start is the UK's leading family support charity, with 336 regional schemes including Home-Start Hounslow helping nearly 34'000 families and over 71'000 children a year.

We provide parents with young children an outreach service in their own homes through volunteers giving regular support, friendship and practical help to prevent family crisis and breakdown.

Our volunteers are trained to support local families facing a variety of difficulties, including loneliness and isolation, ill health, post-natal depression, disabilities, bereavement, lone-parenting and coping with several pre-school children.

Home-Start volunteers are all ages and from all walks of life, all we ask is that you have parenting experience, you attend our preparation course and you can spare two to three hours a week to visit someone.

Our next preparation starts on Friday 17 January 2014.

Mary, who lives in Chiswick, is one our Hounslow Volunteers. She had no prior experience before her initial 'Volunteer Preparation Course', yet found that it was a "thorough and well-planned course", allowing her to be confident in performing tasks that families might ask her to do.

Her preparation course also allowed her to meet her fellow volunteers and the staff, particularly important because by the end of the course, the staff was aware of the "strengths and experiences" of each volunteer, and could match volunteers up to families where they could really make a difference.

In both families Mary worked with, she found the matching "masterly", and even if all she could offer was "basically being myself and cheerfully turning up each week", it was enough to lift the spirits and "lighten the burden" placed on a family. At the end of it all, families who have asked for help are "nothing if not eager to let you know how grateful they are...the appreciation they show makes it all very worthwhile!"

If you would like to make a real difference to parents’ and children’s lives, then follow the contact details in the right-hand box

January 10, 2014