This campaign has now closed
We need help to keep our Information Centre for Older People in Gateshead open please. Due to lack of funding we're currently only able to staff the Centre 2 days per week - & we're not meeting demand. We provide a one-stop shop (by phone and face to face) on a wide variety of subjects such as benefits & allowances, utilities, housing, debt, going into care & a range of both complex & low level problems. Situated in Gateshead High Street, our Centre attracts many older people from the surrounding areas, many of which are classed as areas of deprivation. (For example, 9 of Gateshead's 22 wards are in the top 10% most deprived wards in the country; we have one of the lowest levels of vehicle ownership in the country; we have a higher than average number of single pensioner households.)
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Beneficiaries
Situation
Our Information Centre helped 3,000 older people last year - and we need to sustain this, return to being open 5 days per week and also extend what we can offer as our Information & Advice workers (and small team of volunteers) can't always cope with the volume of calls and visits. We accessed £900,000 in benefits and allowances for older people last year (which they needed but weren't claiming because they didn't know about them, thought they were ineligible or the system was too complex for them to understand). Recently many of our calls, or people coming to the Centre, have been related to anxiety about utility bills and their rising costs and we can help people look at a variety of providers to ensure they get the best deal for them. We also liaise with utility providers on clients' behalf if there are problems. £57,000 would fund our Information Centre for a year. This includes 2 fulltime & 1 part time Information workers, rent/heating/electricity/cleaning and posters and leaflets to publicise the service. (We haven't publicised the Centre as widely as we'd have liked yet because of our current limited capacity.) Just a few examples of the sorts of queries & problems we help with: "I'm deaf and find speaking on the phone difficult so could you ring up a plumber for me to help with my broken toilet". "I have to have the heating on all day as my husband is housebound and I'm sick with worry about how we're going to pay our winter fuel bill." "My next door neighbour's husband has died and she has no family and is on her own all the time - is there any help available?" "I've heard about Pension Credit but don't know what it is or if I can get it." "My mother's finding it difficult to cope at home but we don't know what help is available." "The Council said they would come and fix my guttering months ago and nothing's happened." "I've had this letter about my pension but I just don't understand it." "My husband is terminally ill and I'm not in the best of health so catching two buses to visit the hospital every other day just isn't possible and taxis are so expensive. Can you help? " (& we can thanks to a wonderful team of volunteers.) Many thanks.