Online Lifeskills for Financial Wellbeing

Aim

We want to expand our existing online debt and benefit service to include essential lifeskills training to achieve financial independence.

***Our previous campaign through Aviva was to provide additional financial lifeskills coaching across our face to face centres. Thank you so much for your support! Now we're expanding our ONLINE SERVICES so that we can reach more people virtually and to ensure that we remain accessible and continue to be resilient against any future Covid imposed restrictions***

About our Charity

Freedom is a fast moving, innovative Charity that helps lift people from all walks of life and backgrounds out of poverty.  The Charity was established in 2008 and now operates 13 face to face centres in areas of deprivation across North East Derbyshire, South Yorkshire and North Nottinghamshire.  During the winter of 2021/22 we also worked in partnership with central government and Derbyshire's Local Authorities to support rough sleepers into safe, warm, sustainable accommodation.

We offer practical and emotional support with complex social issues including addictions and dependencies, debt and financial crisis, benefits claims, food poverty, poor mental health, abuse and domestic violence, underemployment and unemployment, insecure housing and homelessness.

We have 180 trained and compassionate volunteers, 5 frontline Support Workers including an FCA registered debt advice worker who last year achieved over £0.5Million financial outcomes for our deprived communities.  We also distributed over 4500 food parcels and pre-covid welcomed over 9000 individuals into our centres.  Due to the cost of living and energy crisis we are bracing ourselves for an unprecedented year where the rise in demand for our services is expected to rocket.

The Issue

Due to Covid impacts and the cost of living crisis, we're supporting many more people who are working but are struggling to make ends meet .  Some are having to make the choice between putting the heating on and eating, or choosing to go without food so their children can eat.  Many of them don't understand their finances or how to manage them.

In addition to the above, approximately 70% of the homeless young adults that we support each year are care leavers. These vulnerable individuals are often dealing with deep rooted trauma, have often had multiple foster placements and have lacked a consistent positive role model.  

Imagine leaving care, being given a key to a flat or a room in a shared house and not knowing how electricity works, how to cook, clean, how to pay your bills.  Pretty quickly many young care leavers fall behind on their rent, amass debt and are threatened with eviction - and there is no loving parent to help pick them back up. 

As teenagers, many of us didn't recognise that the household chores that our parents nagged us to do, were actually essential lifeskills training for when we were ready to leave home!

The Solution

Freedom has been helping people in crisis since 2008 and our team of experts are perfectly placed to help lift people out of poverty and most critically help them stay out of poverty. 

So that people can better understand and manage their finances and their home, we need your help to enable us to reach more people so that we can teach essential lifeskills.  These lifeskills will be offered to every person who we support through our online centres.  Our current online centres are based in areas of significant deprivation and where no other existing services exist, or if there are existing services present they are either inaccessible (often due to operating long waiting lists, not having convenient appointment times or having transport issues to get to a face to face appointment).

Our existing online centres are based in: Darlington (County Durham), Dronfield (North East Derbyshire), Northampton, Darnall (Sheffield City), Witham (Essex) with new centres due to come online in Doncaster, Chesterfield and Downham (London).

With your kind donation, our Support Workers will have the extra time to spend with individuals 1:1 to help them to budget to become more financially resilient and allow them to take control of their finances.  We'll help them work out their income and expenditure, understand their priority payments, manage their debt, understand their tenancy agreements and their responsibilities, help them set up a bank account, direct debits, source the best utility tariff.  We'll also refer them into support services that are available in the client's local area including foodbanks and friendship clubs.

This project successfully funded on 20th September 2022