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Category: Service Spotlight

Service Spotlight: Safety In The Home

Posted on by Samantha Latchayya

Supporting families in reducing preventable home accidents through education and the provision and installation of home safety equipment.

Each month we take a look into one of the great services offered by YCC. This month, with Home Safety Week also falling into June, now is the perfect time to recap on everything that YCC’s Thriving Kirklees department have to offer, to make your home safe for young children.

The aim of YCC’s Safety in the Home service is to reduce the risk and prevent childhood accidents in the home by supplying and fitting home safety equipment into the property of eligible families.

This can include safety gates, fire guards, bathmats, cupboard locks, corner cushions and cord winders. 

We focus on the TOP 5 most common childhood accidents that occur in the home such as, slips, trips and falls, burns and scalds, poisoning, fire and strangulation. Our fitters provide families with information & advice on how to reduce these risks.

As part of this service, YCC are also working in partnership with West Yorkshire Fire & Rescue service to ensure every eligible family also receives a free home fire safety check, which can result in new smoke detectors being fitted.

Service Spotlight: National Healthy Start

Posted on by Samantha Latchayya

Did you know that if you’re more than 10 weeks pregnant or have a child under 4, you may be entitled to get help to buy healthy food and milk?

“YCC have been keeping in regular contact with me and have helped me get additional support – I signed up to the Healthy Start scheme and it has made a huge difference. I just wanted to say, you’re doing a great job… You care, and in these times and previously that means the world.”

National Healthy Start Service User
YCC’s National Healthy Start is a service offered in Partnership with Thriving Kirklees, led by Katie Lockwood – 0-19 Health & Wellbeing Service Manager ([email protected])

If you’re more than 10 weeks pregnant or have a child under 4, you may be entitled to get help to buy healthy food and milk.

If you’re eligible, you’ll be sent a Healthy Start card with money on it that you can use in UK shops. Your benefit will be added onto this card every 4 weeks.

You can use your card to buy:

  • plain liquid cow’s milk
  • infant formula milk
  • fresh, frozen, and tinned fruit and vegetables and
  • fresh, dried, and tinned pulses

You can also use your card to collect:

Healthy Start Maternal vitamins – these support you during pregnancy and breastfeeding

Healthy Start vitamin drops for babies and young children – these are suitable from birth to 4 years old

What you could get

  • £8.50 each week for children from birth to 1
  • £4.25 each week for children between 1 and 4
  • £4.25 each week of your pregnancy from the 10th week

Your money will stop when your child is 4, or if you no longer receive benefits.

Using your card

You’ll receive your card by post. It’ll come with your first payment on it. Money will be automatically added to your card every 4 weeks. Before you use your card, you need to activate it before you use it in a shop.

To activate your card, get your PIN, hear your balance, or to report your card as lost, damaged, or stolen, you can contact National Healthy Start on 0300 330 2090. This phone line is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

If you require an interpreter, please call 0300 330 7010 or email [email protected] 

You will need your: 

  • card
  • date of birth
  • client ID (located at the top of the letter that came with your card)

Service Spotlight: Community Friends

Posted on by Samantha Latchayya

About Community Friends:

  • The service is available to adults over the age of 18 who may be experiencing isolation and loneliness.
  • Adults can be referred by a professional, family or self-refer. 
  • The aim of the service is to encourage people to be more socially active and to build stronger relationships 
  • Community Connections volunteers visit / telephone people weekly.
  • Our volunteers try to encourage service users to be more socially/physically active where possible.
  • Our Volunteers undergo training and are DBS checked.

We’re always in need of more volunteers! If you’re a good listener, enjoy chatting, and have a spare hour in the week, please get in touch. Volunteering is extremely rewarding and makes a huge difference.

Who can access this service?

Adults over the age of 18 who may be experiencing isolation or loneliness can access these services free of charge.

How to access this service:

If you would like to access this service, either for yourself or a friend or family member, simply get in touch with us using the below contact details, and we will send you any relevant application forms. 

Our dedicated team will then seek to match the individual with a suitable volunteer as quickly as possible. This can take up to four weeks, depending on the availability of our volunteers.

Costs

Please note that these services are provided completely free of charge. 

Contact Details

If you have any questions about this service, please feel free to check out our FAQ page, or contact us using the below information.

Please email [email protected], or call 01484 415465 / 07458 055 044

The advice I would give to someone thinking about volunteering is, “DO IT!!!”. It benefits in more ways than one. As much as it helped me, I also knew I was helping someone else at the same time.

Laura Cumiskey, Community Friend Volunteer

“Having my volunteer befriender has helped me so much. We go for a walk for a couple of hours every Sunday. We have a really good chat as we are walking, it’s great. I have become fitter since I met my volunteer which has helped me in other ways. I feel happier. My befriender is brilliant, he really is a great guy. ”

Community Friend Service User.

Service Spotlight: The Domestic Abuse Perpetrator Programme (DAPP)

Posted on by Samantha Latchayya

What is the DAPP?

DAPP stands for Domestic Abuse Perpetrator Programme. It is a 17 week programme that seeks to increase the safety of women and children, and the quality of life of everyone in the family, by working with men who recognise that they have been abusive towards an intimate female partner and who want to stop that behaviour.  Domestic abuse includes physical violence, emotional abuse, or any other form of coercive control. The programme runs alongside one-to-one support sessions to ensure men are offered a robust intervention.

YCC is fully accredited by RESPECT, the National Association for Domestic Abuse Perpetrator Programmes and Associated Support. The DAPP is open to men aged 18 and over from any ethnicity or religious background.

What happens on the programme?

17 group sessions are facilitated to provide participants with insight into how their behaviour is abusive and how to learn non-abusive behaviour strategies to use to enhance and reduce risk within families and relationships.

ISS Victim support is offered to all victims whilst men are on programme and up to 3 months post programme.

This support offers a robust risk management and safeguarding which is tailored to each individual’s needs.

During the programme, participants will cover:

  • The damaging effects of blaming others for their behaviour and how to stop doing it
  • The wide range of impacts of abusive and controlling behaviour in intimate relationships.
  • The (sometimes hidden) impact on children of a father’s abusive behaviour
  • How to be less reactive and prevent the actions of others affecting the choices they make
  • How arguments escalate and how to prevent escalation
  • How to recognise and stop abusive or controlling behaviour before it happens
  • How to avoid being trapped in destructive or repetitive patterns of negative thinking 
  • How to know themselves better so they can stay calm
  • How to take appropriate ‘time outs’
  • How to negotiate more effectively in a relationship

Outcomes: 

Research into RESPECT accredited programmes (like the DAPP) shows that most women and children feel significant improvements in their sense of safety after the man completed a programme of this type. This research also shows most women who had experienced sexual or physical violence from their partner stated that this violence had stopped after the programme.

Men who have engaged fully with the programme by attending all the sessions and participating with full honesty have told us they feel a great benefit from the practical skills and fresh perspective they have learned.

These skills and personal insights appear to improve their experience of life and can help them regain contact with their loved ones and build a safer environment for them.

Men also report they have experienced significant encouragement and support from meeting and talking with other men, helping them see they are not alone in their struggle and that progress and change is not only possible but is merely a matter of making better and more informed choices.

Other intervention services: 

The DAPP Service also facilitate other different types of intervention as and when funding is available to roll out different types of Programmes to fully encapsulate the broad spectrum of risk and types of Domestic Abuse.

We are currently facilitating a DAPP 17 Week RESPECT Accredited programme to the Urdu & Punjabi speaking community. This is delivered by dual speaking facilitators, which also captures the complex issues of domestic abuse attached to some cultural beliefs held by perpetrators within this community.

The additional services will be updated on the site when available with details on how to access these.

For full details on the DAPP, click here to visit our website.

Service spotlight: Safety Rangers

Posted on by YorkshireChildrensCharityAdmin

This January we have selected Safety Rangers for our service spotlight. 

Safety Rangers is an interactive, accident prevention event aimed at Year 5 pupils that attend school in Kirklees.

The event runs four times a year for two weeks at a time, welcoming a different local school every day.

Pupils that attend Safety Rangers take part in several fun and interactive courses throughout the day, that teach them important life-skills and build confidence. These include:

  • Home and seasonal Fire Safety
  • Anti-Social Behaviour
  • Road Safety
  • Emotional Health and Wellbeing
  • Physical Health and Nutrition.

The classes are taught by experienced professionals from establishments such as West Yorkshire Police, West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service, Huddersfield Town Football Club, and Northorpe Hall Child and Family Trust.

Here’s what some of the teacher’s had to say following our events in 2021:

‘Very engaging and interactive giving children a real awareness of current local issues’

‘Safety Rangers was very informative as well as challenging for children, it made them think about what they do and how they do it. It’s been great to see a change in attitude and behaviour towards these subjects’

‘The variety of scenarios was really good. All the activities appealed to all children. All the staff and services were very friendly’

Did you know: In October 2021, Tracey Brabin, Mayor of West Yorkshire attended the Safety Rangers event and took part in all of the different sessions with the children.

For more information on the Safety Rangers events, please visit our website, email [email protected] or call 01484 519988.

Service Spotlight: Hopeful Families

Posted on by Samantha Latchayya

The Hopeful Families programme is an innovative and flexible community programme designed to support individuals who may be challenged by difficulties that prevent them actively seeking employment, education, or training. Our programme is person-centred and tailored to meet individual needs.

This may include personal development, Health and wellbeing, Developing essential life-skills/work skills, Mental health, and Employment rights.

The Hopeful Families team offer individuals (18+) one to one and small group work support throughout the programme, traditionally face to face and always completely free of charge.

As well as supporting individuals to overcome barriers to training, employment and education, Hopeful Families also runs fun events for the children of service users, aimed to support the adults on the programme (such as organised events during Easter, Christmas and summer holidays). Focusing on the welfare of the service users and their families.

Support is provided through Family Mentors and our Progression Coach who offer one to one sessions with either an individual in the family, or with the family as a whole, to help improve their situation and encourage a more positive outlook.

For more information, please visit our website.

#WeAreYCC #HopefulFamilies #ImprovingLivesInspiringChange