Communities Fund provided £620 of match funding
Citizens Advice - Keep Warm this Winter
Addlestone, England, United Kingdom
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Aim
We are raising money to help keep our Advisers advising, particularly as we come into the winter months.
We're fundraising for Citizens Advice Runnymede and Spelthorne (CARS), who provide free, confidential and impartial advice on a huge range of issues. CARS is a small independent charity led by volunteers and responsible for raising all its own funds. It's part of the national Citizens Advice network across the UK.
As we come into the winter months, more clients ask for our help with affording their bills, keeping their homes warm, affording food, managing finance and debt, budgeting advice, maximising income, support to apply for welfare benefits and priority applications to reduce energy bills, educating clients about their finances, dealing with housing issues, homelessness and crisis situations. Many clients aren't able to deal with these issues by themselves, so the money we raise will go directly towards supporting our Volunteers to keep them advising and helping clients with their Financial Wellbeing - paying for costs such as travel to Outreach, training, legal books and subscriptions, IT and other office costs and even things like stamps and envelopes to send back applications for welfare benefit forms for clients if clients cannot afford stamps and envelopes themselves.
Our mission is to help people find a way forward, whatever their issue. We support residents of Runnymede and Spelthorne, two of the most deprived boroughs in Surrey, as well as partnering with neighbouring Citizens Advice branches to deliver services across West Surrey as well as Surrey-wide. We aim to help prevent a crisis occurring or, if a crisis has already occurred, address it either by empowering the client through advice and information or offering specialist caseworker support where a client is unable to take action themselves.
We provide a safety net for many of the most vulnerable and impoverished members of the community, maximising income, resolving and preventing poverty and homelessness as well as other related issues which increase our clients stress and poor mental and physical health. We improve the wellbeing and circumstances of many of the most vulnerable and impoverished people in our community, building resilience by empowering people and supporting them to help themselves.
Our services include support with housing/homelessness, food bank referrals, financial health checks, welfare benefits, debt and money advice, employment, consumer, health, law and courts, immigration and support for Carers.
The funding landscape currently is challenging for small charities so we are fundraising to help raise money to ensure we can continue our vital service.
How we’ll spend the money raised
£25 would fund a Volunteer to attend an Outreach session
£50 would fund some Adviser training
£100 would fund an IT license and admin costs
£500 would pay for some specialist Caseworker time to conduct a financial health check and help a client manage their debt
Funding method
Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made by 2nd December 2026 at 11:32am