February Member of the month: Gingerbread

Agency CV

What geographical area do you serve? England and Wales 
When was your organisation founded? 1918
How many staff/volunteers do you have? 50 in the whole organisation – but 12 in the helpline and advice team
Who are you funded by? A mix of statutory, corporate and individual donations
What’s the average number of clients you help each year? 25,000

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Can you tell us about an accomplishment your organisation has achieved in the past?

Gingerbread, over its long history, has been at the forefront of many positive changes for single parents, from the abolition of the workhouse in the 1940s and the repeal of the Bastardy Acts in 1987, through to the introduction of the Child Poverty Bill in 2009.

A recent example is our campaign to have child maintenance disregarded in the calculation of benefits. This comes into effect in April 2010 and will mean single parents on benefits can keep all of the maintenance that they are paid – previously they could only keep £10 of this. Single parents are some of the poorest families in Britain, with over half living below the poverty line, so this additional money will make a real difference to families. Gingerbread used the experience of parents who call our help and advice line to make the case to Government about why this change mattered. 

Are there any specialist projects currently under way you would like people to know about?

As part of our freephone Single Parent Helpline service (0808 802 0925), we run a number of different specialist projects. The Family Safe project is for single parents dealing with threatening or violent behaviour from their children. Under the project, our Helpline arranges for a dedicated Parentline Plus worker to ring the single parent back at an appointed time for a call that lasts up to forty minutes and to have a second and even third call directly with the same worker. There are many reasons why children may become threatening – from anger and frustration, to low self-esteem, to drugs or peer pressure, a sense of loss caused by the departure of a parent, having to move home or school or losing friends. We hope that the project’s specialist, telephone support guidance sessions will enable the parent to think through the problem and to decide how they can work with their child to improve things for the future.

Why is your organisation a member of AdviceUK, and why is being a member important for your centre?

Gingerbread thinks it is very important for the independent advice sector to work collectively where possible, to deliver the best services to our clients, as well as reducing duplication of time and resource for agencies. Our Helpline team often signposts callers to an appropriate local agency which is better placed to deal with their enquiry, and being a member of AdviceUK helps us to keep track of different organisations around the country. We also value the membership services such as the Indemnity Insurance provisions which allow us to advise our callers with confidence.

What do you think the future will bring in general for advice work?

We hope that independent advice provision will continue to have a central place in the 21st century welfare state, as we know that single parents will continue to face many of the difficulties and problems that they always have done, as well as being faced with more responsibilities and pressures in many other areas. The internet age offers many challenges but hopefully also many solutions to the provision of advice services and it is important that we adapt the ways that we reach out to our client groups, to ensure that they receive the services that they need.

What are your experiences with funding over time, and has anything changed in that regard lately?

Funding is always an issue in the voluntary sector, with time-limited funding and the need to reinvent existing projects in order to try and sell them again to keep them going. We have been lucky in the past to secure corporate funding and significant donations from our supporters but we have noticed much more competition for other funding streams over the past 12 months. As an organisation, we are aiming to be much more thorough and strategic in our approach to fundraising, trying to sell the credibility and worth of the organisation as a whole entity to help us move forwards. Whether we look at the Helpline service, or our membership service, the policy and research work or our single parent employment programmes, we feel that Gingerbread as a whole organisation must be maintained to ensure that single parents are supported and not stigmatised in wider society.

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Member of the month

Offering free debt advice for the west Kent area with over a 100 hundred volunteers.

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