Volunteer as a group or organisation to help us deliver support to households in need
Find out if your organisation can help to give out vouchers for food, utilities and other essential needs to families experiencing hardship this winter.
Delivering the Household Support Fund (HSF) through your community and voluntary organisation
About the funding
The Household Support Fund is a new grant available from the DWP this winter to support people who can't afford to pay for essential items.
If you can provide support quickly, you can help us to deliver this scheme directly into the communities through the households you already know and work with.
Community organisations can encourage people to ask for help who may not want to get in contact with the council.
Providing this help could also encourage households you might not have had contact with before to get in touch. This will mean you can also help them with other support you provide.
The fund ends 31 March 2022. This means that any vouchers paid for from the HSF must be given to households before this date
What the funding is for
The funding is for people experiencing, or at risk of, hardship this winter.
The funding can be used for things like:
- food
- heating and other utility costs and items relating to this like heaters or boilers
- clothes and bedding
- essential household items, such as:
- cookers
- fridges
- washing machines
- other essential needs that would place the household in hardship if they did not have them.
What you need to do so you can help
There will be no formal application for households to fill out in order to access the fund. However we will need to get some basic data from you on what the funding has been spent on for each household. You will have to return this to us regularly for monitoring purposes. This will include:
- how many households have children
- how many households don't have children
- what type of items have you provided to these households.
A child is anyone under 19 as of 31 March 2021, or anyone 19 or over who has child-related benefit or free school meals.
If an eligible child is living on their own, they should be treated as a household.
What you need to do to get involved
Send an email to debbie.abbott@brighton-hove.gov.uk to register your interest and explore how you can help us deliver support this winter.