On Saturday 30th September, a team of 10 people from Home-Start Hillingdon are walking over 13 miles down the length of Hillingdon to raise funds for and awareness of the life-changing support we provide for families who live in our Borough.

Your donation will enable us to continue to recruit, train and support volunteers to come alongside families when they are most vulnerable to help them find their way through the challenges they face.

Being a parent, whatever your situation, can be very challenging, especially when children are young. Many parents feel exhausted and overwhelmed by the stresses of family life. For some parents it’s a particular struggle because they are also coping with issues such as post-natal depression, their or their child’s illness or disability, isolation or multiple births.

Home-Start Hillingdon takes referrals from professionals like Health Visitors and Mental Health Workers alongside self-referrals. We recruit, train and manage a team of exceptional peer support volunteers who provide weekly visits for up to 6 months based from a family’s own home, building a foundation of trust in order to help parents work towards goals they have set themselves that they feel will help them cope better.

Last year we helped nearly 120 local families and we are really proud that we supported them to achieve or partially achieve nearly all the goals they set themselves! (89% fully achieved, 7% partially achieved) As a result, by the end of support 93% of the families supported were coping better (with an average 41% improvement on initial coping scores and some improving by around 200%!)

We take the quality of support and relationships really seriously and we believe that’s why we are so successful. Our model of volunteer peer-support creates a virtuous circle that bridges communities and empowers society as a whole: members of the community who want to make a difference are enabled to support those at a point of vulnerability who are, in turn, inspired by this to “pay it forward” in the future.

We are extremely passionate about what we do and the difference it makes to families, and would greatly appreciate your donation(s) for the longevity of our charity and to continue supporting us in changing the lives of local families for the better.