Financial Stability For Homeless Families

Aim

To increase the support we give to homeless families to enable them to better manage their finances during these challenging times.

The Gingerbread Centre – what do we do?

Hi, my name is Chris and I am part of the team at The Stoke Gingerbread Centre. We help families in the city and surrounding area who have been made homeless or are under threat of losing their home. Many people have preconceived ideas about homelessness and often just associate it with rough sleepers, but it is a much bigger and more complex issue triggered by many circumstances.

There is nothing worse than losing your home. Our priority when a family is referred to us is to provide temporary accommodation in one of our flats or houses to keep them together. This is provided for as long as necessary. Very often when they lose their home the family can be split up with children going into temporary foster care and the parents into bed and breakfast accommodation. This can make a bad situation worse, especially for the children. Our main accommodation site is Rothesay Court in Longton, Stoke-on-Trent (pictured). Our second building, Catherine Court in Hanley, concentrates on supporting teenage parents and their families. Both facilities are staffed 24 hours a day.

Family Support – how does it work?

Once we have a family settled into their new accommodation, our Family Support Team works with them to establish what led to them being made homeless and then formulates a bespoke support package to address the issues and get them back on track and ultimately back into a home of their own, regardless of how long it takes. In some instance we have supported families for up to two years. This support can address lifestyle issues, benefits, budgeting and much, much more.

We are currently receiving more referrals than we can handle and many people are losing their homes because of domestic violence and mental health issues, which are often the final stage of a sequence of events. Homelessness is a very complex matter and the process can start with something quite minor, such as failing to manage the household finances and food shopping leading to food poverty and immense stress within the family, which finally escalates to total breakdown and loss of the family home. The current cost of living crisis is making an already tough situation much worse for some families.

Why do we need your support – our project?

Requests for support from The Gingerbread Centre are at an all-time high, we are currently receiving on average two referrals a week from as far afield as Manchester, Wolverhampton and the wider West Midlands but our resources are limited. The situation for us has been made worse by a 25% reduction in our statutory funding from Stoke City Council which has also now been frozen until 2025. With inflation currently at around 10%, this income source will be eroded further over the next three years.

The Family Support Team work with families to help them achieve amongst other things, financial stability, budgeting and financial management skills. Sound financial organisation, which means living within their means and hopefully ensuring heating and lighting costs and food essentials are covered is included. All of this helps towards family wellbeing. Families can face food poverty and a cold home because they can’t budget and because they lack the required skills to make best use of and manage their money. Expensive takeaways may be bought rather than preparing a cheap meal causing additional financial pressures. 

Vision

The Gingerbread Centre cannot eradicate homelessness in Stoke-on-Trent and the surrounding area. However, our vision is that every family referred to the Centre eventually goes back into a home of their own with the necessary skills to hopefully ensure that they never become homeless again and that skill set would include managing the family budget.

How we will use the money

We are a very cost effective charity. To deliver one hour of family support costs just £12.84. Like all businesses, we are being affected by increased energy costs and inflation generally and it is vital during these challenging times that we are able to maintain and even increase the amount of family support that we can deliver. 

Any money raised from this project will go directly to fund the provision of front line family support services at the Stoke Gingerbread Centre. This will ensure that the families that we are helping get all of the support they need. Where appropriate, we will also bring in external agencies to provide additional, specialist advice and support.

And finally….

Please remember, homeless isn’t hopeless. It just takes one thing to trigger a set of circumstances, like dominoes falling over, to mean within a very short time, a family can lose their home, the garden they love and even the family pet. Please watch our video to get an overview of our facilities and the support that we provide. A recent endorsement of our work came from the Chair of a Stoke Social Services Case Conference who said:

“This city (Stoke-on-Trent) is very privileged to have an organisation like Gingerbread who supports families like they do, as there are none others like it.” 

Please support us. Thank you very much.

This project successfully funded on 20th January 2023