The UK’s leading advice charity is aiming to extend the assistance it can provide to people living across County Durham by increasing the number of volunteers it brings into the organisation.
Citizens Advice County Durham is opening up a new training room at its Spennymoor High Street office in order to provide the space required to train and support growing numbers of volunteers.
The room is currently used as a storage facility, but after using a £1,670 grant from the Banks Group’s Banks Community Fund to make internal alterations that ensure the building’s cellar can be accessed safely, it has been able to create extra space by relocating its files downstairs.
The new training room will allow Citizens Advice County Durham to train up to 16 additional volunteers which will help the organisation manage its ever-growing workload.
It will also enable it to offer training on areas including digital skills and inclusion that will help local people get better access to the support and services they require.
The grant has also covered the purchase of two A3 scanners which volunteers can use when helping local residents.
Alongside its Spennymoor headquarters, Citizens Advice County Durham has offices in Durham, Seaham and Barnard Castle, while it also holds regular outreach surgeries and activities in a range of other locations across the county to ensure its support and advice are readily available and that any local concerns or trends can be identified and addressed.
The charity’s team of volunteers and paid staff supported almost 4,500 people in its last financial year, with two-thirds of them having long-term health conditions/disabilities and almost half aged 55 or over.
Jeanette Bovo, data & funding coordinator at Citizens Advice County Durham, says: “The demand for the support and services we provide is getting ever greater, so we’ve been looking at how we can bring more volunteers into the organisation to help us meet this local need.
“Providing proper training is an essential part of equipping with the skills required to join our team, but we’ve been limited by the amounts of physical space we have available in which we can deliver it.
“The internal changes we’ve made have allowed us to relocate our storage area downstairs and have opened us a lot of new space in which we can provide training for our volunteers in a comfortable, welcoming environment.
“Increasing our capacity will mean our clients will be able to get the help they need more quickly, while our volunteers will have a better experience as they get fully up to speed.
“Our long-term aim is to create a proper workshop hub in Spennymoor that will help us deliver a wider range of community services, and the support we’ve had from the Banks Group has set us on our way towards achieving this goal.”
Kate Culverhouse, community relations manager at the Banks Group, adds: “Citizens Advice County Durham provides invaluable support and advise to thousands of local people and makes a huge difference to the quality of life that they’re able to enjoy.
“Bringing more volunteers into the organisation will help them achieve even more and we’ve very pleased to be helping them take this refurbishment project forward.”
The Banks Group’s community funds are independently managed by Point North (formerly the County Durham Community Foundation).
Anyone from a community close to a Banks Group project who is interested in applying for funding from the Banks Community Fund should contact the company via its website enquiry form (www.banksgroup.co.uk/contact-us/) to find out if their group or project is eligible.
Spennymoor's local community newspaper.
