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

Home-Start Hounslow is a local charity that offers an outreach service through volunteers giving regular support, friendship and practical help to families who are under stress in their own homes, helping to prevent family crisis and breakdown.

Their 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 they ask is that you have parenting experience, that you attend a preparation course and you can spare two or three hours a week to visit someone.

The next preparation course is in January 2013, in Hounslow:

• Every Tuesday 9.45am – 2.45pm, from 15 January to 19 March 2013

Volunteer information open days are on Thursday 13 and Tuesday 18 December at Home-Start Hounslow, Ermine Centre, 18 Ermine Close, Hounslow TW4 7PW. Drop in anytime between 10.00am to 2.00pm on either day when staff will be available to discuss the volunteer programme with you and help with any questions or queries.

If you are interested in helping local families in need, either as a home-visiting volunteer or any other capacity, they would love to hear from you. Please contact Margaret O’Connor on 0208 577 9552, or email homestart_hounslow@yahoo.co.uk.

Home-Start is the UK’s leading family support charity. Regional schemes, including Home-Start Hounslow, recruit and train volunteers to support parents in their own homes who have at least one child under the age of five. Their home visiting work is unique in the UK. The charity was set up in 1973 and now has 336 Home-Starts supporting nearly 34,000 families and over 71,000 children each year. Almost 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.

 

November 29, 2012