Donnington Doorstep Family Centre (360G-ocf-a061600000lvCj3)

Develop a new strand of our targeted family support work and expand our reach: • with isolated women, in particular mothers and young girls, in the Asian community • in order to achieve reduced isolation, improved parenting and family life skills, better engagement with statutory services and other voluntary sector organisations. • which would mean higher reporting of anti-social behaviour in isolated communities, a lower incidence of undisclosed domestic and sexual abuse, and a reduction in vulnerability to extremist messages. We focus on building whole family resilience, which we believe is a highly effective way of combatting the power of negative messages that erode shared values. We think it is very important not to establish this as a separate initiative, but instead we want to weave it into the specialist services already available in our centre, so that our target group becomes better integrated into their locality, and better able to form cross-cultural friendships and protective networks. This work would consist of: - 1-to-1 support from a dedicated family support worker - This would be made available informally by the worker's presence at a regular time each week at our drop-in family stay and play sessions, enabling contact with women who are wary of individual appointments or who would experience resistance from their family networks to accessing support (3 hours/week over 1 year) - Once relationships are established, support would then be delivered by bespoke casework, delivered at the Centre or in the community as appropriate (7 hours/week over 1 year) - Part way into the project delivery we would seek to design and deliver 2 x 10-week parenting programmes for this initiative, adapting our usual content to include input from relevant community and statutory partners to include content around building resilience into family networks. We would intend the participants to be a mix of men and women from the target demographic for this work, and parents from other backgrounds, in order to truly foster a sense of civic participation at the local level. - We also wish to establish a new group for girls from the Asian community, to build resilience, reduce isolation, and facilitate their involvement in either our general youth provision, or referral into our CSE service where needed. (3 hours/week over 20 weeks of the year).We will use the grant to expand our family support work by 10 hours per week, and ensure the availability of a family support specialist in one of our weekly stay and play sessions. We will in addition run 2 parenting programmes with the explicit intention of involving parents from isolated communities, and establish a group for young Asian girls to build resilience and ensure their access to necessary specialist services.