Cheetham Hill Advice Centre (CHAC) is a busy independent neighbourhood advice centre in north Manchester. We mainly provide advice in welfare benefits, housing, debt and immigration. Quality assurance is key to us, and we have Advice Quality Standard certification to provide advice at generalist level, casework standard advice in welfare benefits and debt, and Office of the Immigration Services Commissioner (OISC) registration to provide immigration advice to level one. At the moment we have 8 paid advisers and 15 advice volunteers (including 5 in training).
We were involved in MVAP from the start, as we rely on volunteers to support our advice provision, and we believe in the sharing of resources and knowledge across our sector. It leads to better informed volunteers and staff, joint working mechanisms and increased networks, as well as being more cost effective. Previously we had our own advice volunteer training, and we still recruit volunteers to other roles in the charity.
We have had 45 MVAP volunteer placements during this round of funding (since 2021), 11 of them are still volunteering with us, as well as two who have been with us for five years. The MVAP programme training is very good, and then we complement it with our support and development processes, and gradually build up the work that volunteers do here. You have to embed the organisational procedures on top of the MVAP learning, as each organisation has their own systems. The file review, checking and supervision we do is crucial, so that we know the advice is clear and of quality.
Volunteers are mainly doing the basic level applications for council tax, child benefits and Universal Credit. This has really helped us, with important outcomes for increasing people’s income. The paid advisors don’t always have capacity to do that and we don’t want to block up their time, when they could be doing appeals and more complex issues. The system is difficult to navigate and some people may not be able to do it themselves, but volunteers are also showing them how to do what’s needed and explaining how it works. It’s a good amount of independence for the early start of the volunteers and it builds resilience in the people being supported to try to do things for themselves People feel they get a good service from the volunteers and it’s done quite quickly. Without volunteers we would be struggling massively, we’d see half as many people.
We know that our volunteers get asked advice type questions when they’re out and about. We’re always very careful to encourage them not to go too far if they’re not being supervised as it’s dangerous. They will let people know where they can get help, and they might do form filling but not advice. They’re very good at finding new clients for us, and new volunteers. We’ve got so many who are friends of volunteers, and some whose parents used to be clients. Most people are very local.
All of this has allowed us to grow our own paid staff. Previously, we weren’t managing to recruit. Our MVAP volunteers have the skills and experience to be able to understand what good advice is and explain the process of what they need to do. So even when we’ve done a full and fair open external recruitment, people who’ve done the MVAP training and their volunteer placement here are still coming top. We have recruited four MVAP volunteers to paid posts. This has also led us to revamp the way we work to include people in different kinds of contracts than we expected. For example, one staff member wanted to drop her hours by just 3 hours a week. We never expected this would suit anyone else for employment, but we had at least 3 volunteers who wanted the job. We recruited internally and our new staff member is really happy as it’s sustainable for her in a way that other employment wouldn’t be. In addition, four of our MVAP volunteers have gained paid employment elsewhere in the advice sector and twelve in other sectors.
With everything that’s happened – austerity, Covid-19, cuts to funding – to have kept MVAP going for 12 years is pretty phenomenal. And still the need for advice is massive. Right now, there’s no housing to be had, the Department for Work and Pensions aren’t making decisions on pension credit, the Home Office aren’t making decisions on peoples leave to remain. There are system problems everywhere we turn. It is really positive that the volunteers are able to work at a level where they can achieve something, it’s happening every day. They’re small things in a bigger advice sense and really positive for the volunteers and the people they help. Volunteering is a vital role in the advice world.
Advice and Volunteer Manager
Cheetham Hill Advice Centre
