Housing Matters is a community based advice charity. We give housing and homelessness advice to anyone in Bristol and the surrounding areas. It’s a diverse and mixed community with clients from different ethnic backgrounds, and with health problems and disabilities. We run drop ins across the city in areas with higher levels of deprivation, which are less well served by advice provision.
In the past we have found it difficult to recruit people with the right expertise to work in our service. So, we decided that we needed to develop experts from within. We set up a new training scheme that would bring people in with the right skills and qualities to be great advisers, and offer them on the job training to become fully qualified.
Our trainees start with knowledge based learning on housing and homelessness law and policy. They start to shadow senior colleagues to learn how advice giving works in practice and get experience working directly with clients. They work on our advice helpline and practice in areas like working through an interpreter.
Eventually, trainees graduate to taking on their own cases and running their own drop-in sessions.
We have now run 3 rounds of the trainee scheme and we are always overwhelmed by applications, passionate people from Bristol who are keen to learn and want to make a difference. Of our team of 7 advisers, 5 have been or are current trainees. We are very proud of this success and the role we have played in developing new advisers for Housing Matters and for the wider advice sector in Bristol.
We know that more government support is needed for advice. Further investment would mean we could increase our capacity and bring in more skilled, trained advisers, delivering essential advice and support for the most vulnerable people in our City.
