Family Support
Support Tailored to Every Family
Home-Start Lambeth’s may be able to help if you:
- live in the London borough of Lambeth
- have one or more children under the age of 5 and/or are pregnant in your third trimester
- are in need of a little extra support
Everyone needs a bit of help sometimes
Our goal? To build parenting confidence, strengthen family connections, and ensure families can continue accessing the right support even after our time with them ends
Do you ever feel like this, or do you want to refer someone experiencing any of the following?
- Isolated in your community with no family nearby and struggling to make friends
- Struggling to rebuild after leaving an abusive relationship
- Suffering with post-natal illness but finding it hard to talk to anyone about it
- Having a hard time coping with your child’s illness
- Overwhelmed by the death of a loved one
- Worried about how to prepare for the arrival of a new baby
- Struggling with the emotional and physical demands of having twins, triplets or many children under 5 years of age
- Tired, exhausted, unhappy
- Recently arrived in the UK and struggling to understand what is available or find help.
How Home-Start can help
Every family is unique, and so is the way we support you. We work with you to build a personal support package tailored to your needs, helping you set goals so you can move forward with confidence. Depending on what works best for your situation, this support may be provided by one of our Family Coordinators or a Home-Start Volunteer.
Our Family Coordinators offer specialist guidance and focused 1-to-1 support to help you reach your personal goals. We also have a wonderful team of volunteers—many of whom are parents themselves or have significant childcare experience—who can visit you on a weekly basis to provide emotional support and practical help. Our goal is to ensure you have the right support at the right time to help your family thrive.
What we do
Our work is led by you. We start by listening to you so we can understand how we can help and identify other organisations who might also be able to give you some help. We then work with you to identify goals for our support, and tailor our offer to help you to reach these goals. For example:
- we might work with you on creating bedtime routines for your child
- we might help you with strategies for coping with a child’s behaviour
- we might help you to make new connections in the community
Home-Start has years of experience
Home-Start is a national charity, established over 40 years ago with more than 250 schemes across the UK. Home-Start Lambeth was set up in 1998. You can be rest assured that all Home-Start volunteers are fully trained and have undergone a criminal records check to ensure your child’s safety. All of Home-Start Lambeth’s help is free and confidential.
Important things you need to know about Home-Start Lambeth support
- Our service is free and it is your choice to receive it
- We will respect your confidentiality – we take this seriously
- One exception to this would be if we thought someone was at risk of harm
- We also want to complement the work of other agencies so some general information about the level and nature of Home-Start’s involvement with you might be shared – if we do this, we will talk to you about it and act with your consent
- Our volunteers will give us a description of their visits – this will, of course, be kept confidential and help us to make sure we are giving you the best possible service
- In line with the Data Protection Act 1998 you can request to see any records we hold about you or your family at any time – just ask us
- We hope you will be happy with Home-Start Lambeth’s service but if you do want to make a complaint speak to any member of the team to find out about our complaints procedure
- We are always looking at ways to make our service better and we welcome your comments and suggestions!
“It was just the right amount of support because it didn’t feel like it took over my life. It was really manageable and gave me the boost to keep going for the rest of the week. I want people to be able to have the support I’ve had. It’s just been truly life changing for me and I feel optimistic which is a good feeling I wasn’t having before”
Next: Family Groups