MADAM,

Next year Home Start Monmouthshire will celebrate five years of offering support, friendship and practical help to young families in the county, who are experiencing difficulties.

Since our first volunteers started visiting families in 2011 the scheme has helped 260 local families and 341 children.

This year we received funding from the Big Lottery for a new three year project which we have called ‘Healthy Minds Healthy Families’ This will enable us to give extra, more intensive support to families where there is a mental health issue, perhaps a mother suffering from severe depression. This is a need that we have identified through the work we have been doing in the last few years. This project will take place alongside our core work with families who need support for different reasons.

Also this year we received ‘Investors in Volunteers’ accreditation, recognition of the high quality of the work that we do in supporting our valuable volunteers.

Since 2011 Home Start Monmouthshire has grown and developed and is now recognised as one of the main family support organisations in the county.

We now want to recruit more trustees to help us to continue to develop our work and reach more of the families who need the support that Home Start offers.

Trustees meet bi-monthly in Monmouth for about 2 hours. There are a number of sub-committees which meet between these meetings and which trustees can join if they wish.

If you have some time to spare and would like to find out more you can contact us by phone on 01600 715608 / 07714287629 or send an email to enquiries@homestart

monmouthshire.org.uk

You can visit our website at www.homestartmonmouthshire.org.uk to find out more about the work that we do

We look forward to hearing from you.

Jill Hiscox

(Chair of trustees, Homestart)