Sat, May 08, 2010 page9

• Volunteers take pressure off families

  A program in which volunteers help often chaotic families with at-risk children cope with day-to-day life is showing positive results

  • By Rachel Williams / THE GUARDIAN
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  The cabinet was one of the first things that caught John Cliff’s eye at Kim’s house, along with the bare concrete floors and absence of much other furniture. Tall and freestanding, its lower shelves were empty but the top ones were stuffed full.

  “It was clearly top heavy and was going to go over at some point,” Cliff remembers. “And Kim’s youngest child was crawling at the time.”

  Cliff, a volunteer working in child protection through the charity CSV, soon convinced Kim, who was suffering from debilitating depression, that the shelves had to go. He also found out she was eligible for a free clearance service to get rid of the discarded electrical items and white goods that littered her garden and battled with the local council to get her a new oven, which, unlike her old one, has a door allowing her to cook for her six children using more than just the gas rings.

  

  Cliff played soccer, read and painted with her younger sons, giving Kim much-needed time to herself. Then, as she began to trust him, they started to talk.

  CSV’s Volunteers in Child Protection (ViCP) program was born seven years ago, in the wake of Lord Laming’s report into the murder of eight-year-old Victoria Climbie by the hand of ­members of her family. The charity convinced two local authorities, the London borough of Bromley, and Sunderland, in the northeast of England, to run pilot projects funded by a charitable trust. Volunteers, who are trained and monitored by a project manager employed by CSV, are matched by a social worker with a family — most of which have at least one child on the protection register. In Kim’s case, all six of her children were on the at-risk register.

  The volunteer’s role is to offer practical help that can make a vital difference in often chaotic homes. Starting off with two or three half-day sessions a week, they could make sure the children are fed and dressed properly and get off to school, set up a routine to make mornings less stressful, or encourage families to sit down and eat together. Sometimes they accompany parents to school or to medical meetings. They are also there to offer a friendly, neutral ear for any problems.

  The results, CSV says, have been “staggering.”

  An independent evaluation of the Bromley pilot by Jane Tunstill, emeritus professor of social work at the University of London’s Royal Holloway College, found that of the first 20 families in the program, no child ended up going back on a child protection plan, meaning their families are better able to look after them. Among cases in the borough where volunteers were not involved, 11 percent of children returned to the at-risk register within 12 to 15 months.

  Sue Gwaspari, CSV’s director of part-time volunteering, says it has improved children’s quality of life too.

  One parent told her: “When my children throw a tantrum, I can now send them upstairs to bed without hitting them.”

  Key to the success of volunteers in gaining families’ trust is that their role is distinct from social workers. While the idea persists among parents that social workers “take your kids away,” creating suspicion and fear that their every move is being judged, a volunteer — who will give feedback on progress to their project manager and must still report any causes for concern — is there to listen, not to judge.

  “With a social worker you say all the right things that they want to hear so they can tick all the right boxes,” Kim says. “With a volunteer you can be open.”

  Equally important, volunteers continue to work with a family after the children have come off child protection plans, diminishing the chance of problems recurring because support has suddenly disappeared. And there is immense power in the fact that volunteers are not there because they’re being paid, says Gwaspari.

  Vacancies for volunteers are oversubscribed. Applicants range from people who have left the world of finance after the banking crisis to young mothers with their own experience of bringing up children alone. Cliff, 57, retired from the financial services industry eight years ago looking forward to spending more time on the golf course. He is now working with his sixth family.

  “I managed a couple of years thinking it was really great sitting in the garden, having lunch, doing a sudoku,” he says. “But after that I thought, ‘I can’t possibly do this for another 30 years.’”

  The task now is to get more local councils on board. As well as Bromley, schemes are up and running in the neighboring London borough of Lewisham, the borough of Islington in north London and Southend at the mouth of the Thames, east of the capital. About 15 to 20 other councils across the UK are talking to the charity.

  A ViCP costs around £2,500 a year per family, a sum CSV says will easily lead to savings down the line by keeping children off the at-risk register and ­preventing them being taken into care. However, Gwaspari fears that the upfront cost may be putting some councils off.

  Julie Daly, head of safeguarding and quality assurance in Bromley’s children’s services department, was not put off.

  “I could only see the positives when it was first suggested to us. It’s a very small amount compared to a lot of services. In terms of putting money upfront, it’s minimal,” she says.

  Cliff’s formal volunteering arrangement with Kim’s family ended a year ago, but these days he is classed as a friend. He remains in close contact with the family and still offers help and advice. The children remain off child protection registers and Kim’s transformation from the days when she was crippled by low self-esteem and lack of confidence is “fantastic,” he says.

  There are new challenges — 14-year-old Chloe is expecting a baby in August — but the family says it is ready to cope with a situation that would have been a “nightmare” without Cliff’s work.

  “He taught me to stand on my own two feet,” Kim says.

  Chloe, too, is sanguine about the future.

  “It used to be a lot grumpier here. Now we just get on with what we’ve got to do,” she says.
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