Aim

Moving out of poverty by maximising income and enable good budgeting when clients move to Universal Credit. This will reduce debt.

Filwood Hope has been present on Filwood Broadway since December 1996. I have worked for 14 years. I have a great team of staff and volunteers. Laura and Hero are experienced in advice work. There is a team of 10 volunteers who set the tone by ensuring a welcome to whoever comes in.

Our vision is to work ourselves out of a job!! We want to see resilience and confidence being built up in each client we work with.  

• To encourage self-responsibility, and self-belief by:
• continuing to work with people rather than work for them. 
• exercising intentional expectation of a client’s involvement no matter how menial the task. 
• taking time to keep them abreast step by step – even as e.g., a telephone conversation to a statutory body develops.
• To recognise and respond to what inhibits the significant minority from resolving issues independently. In doing so, we work towards reducing inequality.
• Barriers we recognise include mental and physical health, lack of digital access or ability and financial poverty.
• To provide advice, information, and support to our local community, that would otherwise struggle to access this and/or support themselves independently. 
• This includes monitoring what barriers clients may face in accessing our services, and responding to them.

 Our clientele experience considerable inequality relative the general population in the following ways:

• has high unemployment and dependence on welfare benefits. It goes deeper than this – a significant amount of people think that they do not pay rent nor council tax – the council pays it! and who regard their welfare benefit as their wages.
• Has chronic, generational dependence on welfare benefit system
• Has high percentage, compared to the rest of the city, for long term health disability – physical and mental health
• Aspiration is low or indeed non-existent or crushed for a significant minority
• Life is chaotic for significant minority, due to poor choices, suffering exploitation or disrupted family relationships

(This information has been sourced from Bristol City Council’s ‘2018 Knowle Statistical Ward Profile 2018’, Bristol City Council’s ‘One City Plan’, and our client monitoring.)

We will use any money raised to specifically enable us to offer specialised budgeting tools and advice especially in this time of vulnerability.

This project successfully funded on 21st September 2021