What we offer
enQuire was opened in May 2004. It is located on the ground floor of the New Springs Centre in a room specifically equipped as an advice centre.
The opening hours are Monday to Friday, 10.00am - 4.00pm. Evening appointments are available upon request.
The enQuire office is professional, yet warm and inviting, with a private side room to ensure confidentiality for more delicate matters. Being centrally located in the town centre we are ideally placed to be visible and accessible to all.
We offer an information, advice and guidance service specialising in the area of debt, but are also able to signpost service users to a local source of help for other issue.
Our goal is to provide a warm and professional ambience where service users can come and know that they will receive the best possible quality care and advice.
Information, advice and guidance
We offer an information, advice and guidance service specialising in the area of debt, but are also able to signpost service users to a local source of help for other issues. We offer an holistic approach to those who seek our help by:
- looking at the person as a whole, and not just their immediate need
- helping service users to seek help for a range of problems, where necessary
- providing someone to stand beside them in their hour of need, even visiting other agencies with them if that is what they require
- being an advocate for them - helping their voice to be heard
Benefit Claims Support
This is a service that many other providers have no capacity to offer due to the time-consuming nature of the process. Seeing this need in the community made us realise that this was something we could help with. We offer this service across a range of benefits from Disability Living Allowance (DLA) to Attendance Allowance and additional funding claim forms to local charities for essential items.
Debt Advice
Whilst we offer a service that looks after every aspect of a person's life that covers all types of information, advice and guidance, we do offer a specialised service, where debt is concerned. This is a service that has developed since opening Enquire after experiencing the overwhelming need within our community. Once a service user has asked for assistance we will help them to establish their level of debt and then seek to manage this debt by contacting their creditors on their behalf and establishing an adjusted payment schedule. We will then stand by the service user in a support capacity throughout the time that they are reducing their debts and encourage them to establish new ways of managing their money, thus educating them in a better way forward.
Befriending service
This service is multifunctional, providing visitors for the lonely or to work alongside someone to help them with practical problems such as form filling, telephone calls to official bodies, accompanying them to benefits office / council etc.
Food Parcel Service
Food parcels are available through Enquire. There is a limited supply so service users normally come to us through a referral from a range of local agencies or churches that we work with. This enables the need of the service user to be verified. Each food parcel contains about £15 of essential food items.
About our Service Users
We help anyone in need, regardless of age, gender, socio-economic religion, ethnic background or disability. We do not charge for our services and therefore preclude no one because of their ability or inability to pay. The reputation of the centre means that it deals with service users from all walks of life, from business people to recovering addicts with debt problems and everyone in between. This section only refers to ‘information, advice and guidance’ service and benefit claim support, debt advice and ‘food parcel service’ as we have yet to properly establish the befriending, home maintenance, or the interpretation services.
About our staff
We currently have six paid staff who manage enQuire. However, funding for these posts will finish in March 2008. The team is experienced in working with students, networking in the local community and debt management. One member of staff is a qualified financial advisor, who is experienced in debt counselling, the others are all fully trained and experienced in debt couselling. Their combination of skills ensures that we can offer a wide range of help to our service users. A group of volunteers have been trained in giving basic advice and work alongside the paid staff.
Advice given to service users is monitored. Checks are carried out on a monthly basis by the Project Developer to ensure that records are being kept correctly and advice to service users is appropriate.
Click here to meet the enQuire team
Funding
enQuire was started with the help of four major funders: Severn Trent Trust Fund, Reed Construction, New Springs and Community Cohesion Pathfinder, and more recently has received additional funding from the DTI.
Quality of service
enQuire are members of Advice UK and Next Step (formally Gain). We have also gained the nationally recognised Matrix quality award, and the Community Legal Service Quality Marks for both general and specialist levels, all of which recognise the high quality of our service.
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