Preventing homelessness: Dacorum Citizens Advice

Aim

We are a local charity providing free, impartial, independent, high quality, confidential advice to those that need it most.

Citizens Advice has been the people’s champion since we were established in 1939. This year we are ‘celebrating’ our 85th anniversary but sadly the need is more critical than ever; the cost of living crisis is hitting us from all sides -  we are receiving increasing numbers of clients seeking help and finding it challenging to raise the funds needed to meet the demands of our work.

Our mission is simple yet powerful: to provide free, impartial independent high quality confidential advice which empowers people and is accessible to all across Dacorum. 

Our vision is for a community where people have access to the advice they need in order to find their way forward and the confidence to act upon it; whoever they are and whatever their problem. 

We provide qualified advice on subjects ranging from benefits, debt, housing and homelessness, energy, consumer, immigration, work, relationship and family.

Clients are coming to us with ever more complex issues that are taking longer to resolve, stretching our capacity even further. They may initially want help on housing matters but the total extent of their problem may include their approach to financial management and it will more than likely be having an impact on their health and wellbeing and that of their family. 

Helping to prevent homelessness

The most pressing need across Dacorum and one that's increasing year on year is to be able to support housing needs and prevent homelessness and debt management.  

We now have a situation where we’re seeing significant increases in clients seeking support regarding housing issues - primarily due to the Cost of Living Crisis, mortgage rate increases, increase in rental costs, plummeting rates of new social housing and frozen local housing allowance.  The strain on local housing resources is evident: clients fleeing domestic abuse have been (illegally) “encouraged” to return to their abusive situation; and unsuitable temporary accommodation has been allocated to families.   

With your donation it will help us to provide a dedicated Housing Specialist to address the growing number of people contacting us with housing difficulties.

Help us to help others

• Last year we helped over 7,000 people with over 18,000 issues. 
• For every £1 spent on the Citizens Advice service we benefited our clients by almost £18. 
• Solving problems improves lives, and this means better wellbeing, participation and productivity for the people we help. 
• We are a small local charity.
• We couldn’t achieve all that we do without our team of dedicated volunteers. 
• Within the Dacorum Citizens Advice office we are proud to have a dedicated team of around 50 volunteers and by applying the National Citizens Advice financial modelling tool, the public value of our volunteering impact is calculated to be over £12 million. 
• Even though we have this tremendous resource with our volunteers giving their time for free, it still costs us around £365,000 to run the service as it is now. 

The number of people seeking help increases month on month

• Your gift will help us support people experiencing hardship - debt, homelessness, poverty and unemployment and to increase our capacity to train volunteers.
• If you’d like to help us keep our services free and accessible for the Dacorum community, you can support us as shown below.

Funding method

Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made