Advice Services Transition Fund Case Study

Advice Services Transition Fund Case study

Partnership: Dudley Adviceweb

Local Authority: Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council

Lead organisation: Dudley District Citizens Advice Bureaux

Contact: Chris Little, Advice Services Manager, Dudley CABx

Partners in Dudley Adviceweb: Age UK Dudley- Information and Advice services for older people, TheWhat Centre- advice and counselling services to young people aged 14-25 and up to age 30 if learning difficulties, Centre for Equality and Diversity -advice and mentoring services to asylum seekers, refugees and BAME community and St Thomas’s Network -situated in high deprivation area in Borough and offer support sessions to the local community, offer awareness sessions and workshops plus IAG qualified counsellors and workers.

Area

Dudley Metropolitan Borough includes the towns of Dudley, Halesowen, Stourbridge and Brierley Hill with a total population of 313,000. The people of Dudley enjoy easy access to both urban areas and the countryside. The nearest railway station is a mile outside Dudley Town centre and Stourbridge has good rail links with Birmingham and beyond. There are bus stations in all 4 towns and good connections. 2011 Census figures show 24.8% of population are 60 or over, 11.5% of people are from ethnic groups other than white British (up from 7.5% in 2001)and 70% are employed over 30 hours per week (down 5% from 2001). There is also an increase for people working part time. There are areas in Dudley Borough that are in the most deprived areas in England. These are Wren’s Nest, Castle and Priory, St Thomas’s, Brierley Hill, Brockmoor and Pensnett and Netherton. Stourbridge, Brierley Hill and Halesowen have elected Conservative MPs and in Dudley a Labour M.P. The Local Authority is Labour led.

Overall advice provision

Only 3 organisations give advice in the area. Dudley District Citizens Advice Bureaux (DDCABx), lead organisation, has over 70 years experience in social welfare advice in Dudley Borough. It has 4 bureaux in town centres (Dudley, Brierley Hill, Halesowen and Stourbridge) with over 100 volunteers delivering advice on welfare benefits, debt, housing and employment with the support of paid supervisors. Dudley CABx also has many Projects around the area focussing on those in greatest need. Outreach sessions are in 14 GP surgeries, 11 Children’s centres, a project advising at Atlantic House for clients who are drug and alcohol dependent, a project giving advice for clients diagnosed with cancer delivered at White House Cancer Support centre, Russell’s Hall Hospital, Mary Stevens Hospice, Brierley Hill Health and Social Care Centre and via home visits. A similar Project is for clients with Heart Failure where adviser sees clients at Heart Failure Team clinics or via home visit. DDCABx has a Care and Disability Telephone helpline for clients with disabilities and their carers and a Carers worker for those carers who need face-to-face advice. A further Project offers advice to BAME community in Lye 3 mornings per week. Dudley District CABx offer specialist advice in the area of debt with 3 full time advisers who are Debt Relief Order intermediaries giving specialist advice around the Borough. The Local Authority fund a Debt Prevention Project to prevent homelessness for people renting homes and for those in trouble with their mortgages.

The What Centre based in Stourbridge offer advice and counselling to young people. They have one full time paid worker who supports a few volunteers. Age UK offer advice in the area of welfare benefits and have 2 part time advisers doing this work.

Need- as mentioned earlier there are very few organisations giving advice and advisers were reporting that they were seeing instances where organisations were giving advice when not insured and although it was clear the organisation were really trying to help the client, this was sometimes incorrect advice. Dudley CABx was also asked to provide outreach sessions around the Borough in the hard to reach areas where people would not visit a town centre bureau and was unable to do this without funding.

Dudley Adviceweb Project

The partnership came together to achieve the following:-

• To build capacity of community organisations to engage in strategies to empower people and to raise awareness of social welfare and debt issues
• To create a network of Community Information Points ensuring that they give good information and signpost for advice if they recognise it is needed.
• Improve access to advice for hard to reach groups.
• Develop research role to identify needs and impact of advice.
• To develop stronger relationships between the voluntarysector, faith organisations, the public sector, and businesscommunity.

Outcomes

1. Increased access to consistent and sustainable information and advice services and reduce gaps in knowledge.
2. Increased capacity through collaborate working resulting in being more sustainable in meeting the needs of Dudley Borough residents.
3. The community of volunteers of partners will have increased skills and capacity enriching the organisations they support and increasing opportunities for work and volunteer development.
4. Service users will be better informed on options available to them and have increased confidence to take responsibility for their own lives and have improved health and well-being.

Approach

Partners were reporting that in the current climate, more and more people were coming to community centres for help and support and the requirement for additional partner services had never been more acute- people were facing eviction, redundancy and in need of training on job search and interview skills and wanted to get advice in an environment where they felt comfortable and confident to engage in the appropriate activity. Timing of the funding was set against a background where Legal Aid funding for most social welfare law had ended. Dudley Borough had a culture of informal partnerships but through existing networks CAB had been approached to extend the reach of information and advice and build capacity of volunteers and paid staff from partners within this Project. There was a danger of “advice” without access to training, accurate information resources and adequate insurance. Surveys from service users also reflected the need to have a more joined up approach as people were struggling to cope. The Project also had positive endorsement from Local Authority, Public Health as well as local M.P.s.

Within the borough, Healthwatch Dudley had only recently begun their activities and part of their role was to disseminate information to members of the public as well as hear their views on public health servicesat a number of public venues around the borough via what they were going to call Healthwatch Hot Spots. At the same time, “Making it Real in Dudley” was just about starting its activities too, aiming to put people at the centre of their own care services. Part of their remit was to again disseminate information, this time on social care matters and also listen to the views of members of the public on these matters and they were planning to do this at public venues along the same lines as the Healthwatch Hot Spots. They were to call these Community Contact Points.

The chiefs of Healthwatch Dudley, Making it Real in Dudley, and Dudley District CABx were all at a meeting last Spring and when they heard each other’s plans for the forthcoming few years they decided that the similarities and parallels between the aims of the organisations, in terms of their information giving and awareness raising roles, were so stark that some attempt should be made for all three organisations to work together to achieve their aims. As a result the Community Information Point Network was born. Each organisation has been able to bring different skills and expertise to the partnership and the inclusion of Making it Real in the partnership brings the wider council into the mix, including library services, the central information point for all Dudley Council services (Dudley Council Plus), as well as a number of other local authority reception points. The council being involved in the partnership also makes a number of resources available to the network that would otherwise involve significant cost, potentially more than the network could fund.

How the Project will achieve the above

The Community Information Point Network has been set up to provide participants in the scheme with two modules of training: an Induction Module to introduce people to the network and look at the skills and behaviours required of an Information Champion, and an Information Resources Module whereby delegates are introduced to, and helped to navigate around a number of key websites, including a Community Information Directory, built by the council’s library services. Once people have completed the two sessions they are designated as Information Champions and are free to open an Information Point within the venue/organisation that they work. Once they have been through the initial two modules, they are then offered a series of free training sessions to be delivered by network partners in their particular areas of expertise. Dudley District CABx has been offering training modules to such Champions in the areas of awareness of welfare benefits and of debt and money issues (Dudley Advice WEB training modules attached). It is envisaged that the awareness of benefits and debt issues, and when to stop assisting and refer on to the appropriate agency, will be enhanced in this way across the borough and as a result of the increased number of partners taking part in the Network, will reach a much wider audience than it would have done if we had attempted this project without the new Network partners.

Difference to members of the public or other key stakeholders

The most obvious difference to members of the public will be that they will start to see a number of Community Information Points springing up around the borough all with the same branding, and most specifically in the places that they visit on a regular basis, such as community centres, voluntary groups, community pharmacies, GP surgeries, libraries, local authority reception points, churches and other faith centres and many others. This means that Dudley citizens will now be able to ask people that they already visit and feel comfortable with questions that previously wouldn’t have been answered. For example, when an individual is having serious money problems, it often takes them a long time to summon up the courage or nerve to ask somebody for some help. Often, when they finally do summon up that courage, they ask the wrong person who may not be aware of where their customer should go. If that person merely states that they cannot help them, it may be another six months or more before that person asks anybody else for such assistance in which case their money issues will have got considerably worse. To get assistance and/or information, and to be directed to the appropriate advice agency to have their issue looked at, by a trained Information Champion at the venue that they already visit regularly may help to prevent their situation getting worse. In this way the Network is achieving its aim of preventing local people from getting into crisis situations.

Other stakeholders will appreciate the difference of becoming more aware of their partners within the network. It has become apparent in running the two Introductory Modules (alongside our Healthwatch Dudley partner) how valuable delegates are finding the opportunity to discuss informally the services and activities of each other. For most organisations and the individuals working within them, the day to day running of the organisation and their particular responsibilities withinthem means that they get little chance to find out about neighbouring organisations (often doing similar work to themselves), much less actually meet front line staff from them. This Network is already giving people the opportunity to do this. Two examples from the last six months will help to illustrate this. At one of our early Induction Modules when we had eleven delegates sitting round the table, we had the manager of the council’s central information service (manager of about eighty paid staff) sitting next to a drug and alcohol worker from a local AIDS/HIV charity. It is highly unlikely in the normal way of things these two individuals would have ever spoken to one another. Via the medium of an introductory training session within our Network, these two individuals were able to find out about each other’s work in a very real way (i.e. “straight from the horse’s mouth”, as it were) and about the pressures that they both faced in their very different work lives. Another example at a different session concerned a council employee who had worked within the local community safety team for a number of years and had worked alongside a local older person’s charity throughout that time. A representative of that charity was also in attendance at that session. The council employee found out from the charity representative about a number of services that the charity offered that she had previously been unaware of, and would now be able to signpost some of her customers in that direction. These are just two examples from the many discoveries made by partners at all of the modules that we have held to date.

In the same way and for similar outcomes we will be holding quarterly networking events to get Information Champions together to discuss good practice any difficulties encountered in the running of an Information Point as well as an opportunity for organisations to promote themselves and their services to each other and for general informal networking. In this way we hope to enable and foster links between organisations that may be able to refer to each other, and work together in other ways to the mutual benefit of each other and their customers/service-users, and potentially to find ways of putting in joint funding bids. This, in fact, has already started with two organisations putting in a bid together over the next few months to start a small project with a view to apply for funding for a much larger project shortly after if the smaller one can be shown to be successful.

Also with a view to promoting the Network widely, we are holding an official launch of the Network at the end of September where all existing partners will be invited, many will be hosting stalls to promote their organisations and services. There will be councillors, MPs and other dignitaries there with speakers setting the scene of the Network and how it came about, Information Champions speaking about their experience of running an Information Point and how it has benefitted themselves individually, as well as their organisations, with closing remarks in support of the Network. We hope to have newspaper, radio and TV coverage, as well as substantial social media coverage.

Main features of the Project

• Nine new outreach venues for advice set up and delivering advice- St Thomas’s Network, Beacon Centre for the Blind, Summit House for people with HIV/Aids, Asian Elders Group in Halesowen, Rethink, Langstone Society who work with people with learning disabilities, Queens Cross for people with disabilities and their carers, Brierley Hill Project working with young people in disadvantaged area, Hope Centre- a volunteer- led project on an isolated estate with a large proportion of asylum seekers, ex-offenders, people with mental health issues and those suffering domestic abuse. 95% of clients attending for advice have not accessed advice before.There are many excellent outcomes from these outreaches. Clients have reported that they felt let down by the “system” as they have been constantly referred from service to service. Clients have gained the trust of the adviser who visits a place they are familiar with. They report that they feel more optimistic about the future as they now have someone who will ensure they are getting all the money they are entitled to and help them deal with their debts. Case study 1- one 19 year old ex-offender attended outreach as he had been turned out by his parents and deemed deliberately homeless by the Local Authority. He had become addicted to drugs. With the partnership of the Dudley Adviceweb adviser and worker from Community Project, the client is now living in a one bedroom flat and has found employment in a warehouse. He is considering returning to college to take some GCSEs. Case study 2- Client with 2 children under 5 movedinto area to escape domestic abuse. She had been living in a Women’s Refuge. Client was not happy to see the adviser in an enclosed space and initially was interviewed outside of the building. The client’s income has now been maximised, she is now living in a 2 bedroom property and she has been encouraged to attend a local Children’s centre for additional support.
• Launch of Information Point network mentioned above with contacts from Dudley Adviceweb partners, Healthwatch and Making it real.
• Joint event for volunteer recruitment. In the first 6 months 65 Information Champions and 37 advisers were recruited for CAB, Age UK and the What Centre. Recruitment is ongoing.
• Original 5 partners has extended to a further 14 voluntary/ community and faith group members as well as 10 Community Pharmacies and a number of front of house Local Authority reception points.
• Referrals for advice will be prioritised to those in greatest need, therefore allowing demand to be managed more effectively.
• Trainer recruited for Dudley Adviceweb has recruited and trained volunteers from Dudley CABx, The What Centre and Age UK Dudley in main subject areas- welfare benefits, debt, employment and housing. At the present time 80 volunteers have reported increased knowledge and skills in these subject areas. Plans are in place to train volunteers in more complex social security work to fill the gap left by losing legal aid funding.
• Quarterly forums for Information Champions to come together and feedback on experience.
• Aim for an Ideas Exchange forum. A strong partnership will provide us with further opportunities for funding to help sustain our work.

Challenges