Home-Start Surrey Heath recruits and trains volunteers to help families with at least one child under 5. Our volunteers, who are all parents themselves, support other parents by visiting them in their homes for 2-3 hours each week.
We want to see a society in which every parent has the support they need to give their children the best start in life to focus support on the early years, the most crucial time in a child's development.
We recruit and train home-visiting parent volunteers, to offer one to one, tailored support for parents with at least one child under 5, reaching out to people at risk of social exclusion, including those who do not engage with other services. These volunteers visit families in their homes for 2-3 hours per week, providing practical and emotional support to enable them to achieve or work towards, more positive outcomes and help them find practical solutions to the problems they face. Our objectives are to enable, empower and encourage parents to provide better lives for their children in their own communities. Our volunteers help parents attend health appointments and access a wide variety of services; encourage wider social and support networks and provide opportunities for increased engagement in community life; offer choices for parents and their chil dren and opportunities for their voices to be heard; offer consistent adult role models for parents and their children; promote parental/carer involvement in early literacy activities with their babies and young children through sharing books and other activities and promote active citizenship.
