In recent years, Happy to Help Gateshead transitioned from a community interest company to a charity in order to provide more support to the local community.
Their very first project as a charity was funded by the Bernicia Foundation. Their goal was for young carers to return home from school to a lighter load, easing some of the challenges they encounter during this crucial period in their lives.
In this blog, Happy to Help Gateshead share the impact of this amazing project, and how it has benefited people's lives.
Here at Happy to Help Gateshead, we provide weekly support to predominantly older people in Gateshead. We help with the domestic tasks, errands, and also provide one-to-one assistance to go out and about. We help hundreds of people each week, and have been doing so since 2000.
In March 2022, we were awarded £5900, our first grant as a charitable organisation. Thanks to this generous support from the Bernicia Foundation, we were able to to help young carers and their families with domestic tasks, to free up the young carers' time to focus on their exams, socialise with friends, or simply have some much-needed personal time and respite.
The Bernicia Foundation is a charity that supports projects and initiatives that deliver real and lasting community benefit and helps inspirational young people to fulfil their potential.
In this first pilot, the project supported 12 households, each given up to 15 hours of free support. Here’s just a few comments we received from those we helped:
"It has been amazing. It has eased our stress enormously, and the house looks great. Thank you for all your help."
"My Happy to Help assistant was lovely, really nice to talk to and it has helped us so much."
"It has been a massive help, I miss our chats and she was lovely, and went above and beyond to make things better for our family."
Household A: Their Journey with Happy to Help Gateshead
Household A was referred by the Carer’s Trust to help free up some quality time for the young carers in the family, whose parent was in poor health.
The young carers had been feeling overwhelmed with the amount of tasks building up around the home, and wasn’t sure where to start.
The parent of the young carers was increasingly worried about her children's well-being and her own health. She wished for the home to be more orderly, to make the domestic tasks more manageable.
We found the perfect home help assistant, and the family was happy to begin a weekly visit, for an hour each time, to declutter and organise the house, while cleaning along the way.
Our home help assistant made significant headway, beginning in the dining room well ahead of Christmas so the family could share mealtimes together over the festive period. The young carers quickly started to find it much easier to manage the rooms our home help assistant had cleared and cleaned.
The parent of the young carer told us:
“I think I was very overwhelmed, and it was worrying me how this would be tackled just before Christmas. It was causing me anxiety. I now feel much more positive because I can see where things are, and it has had such a positive impact for our children. This has greatly helped our whole family and has been much appreciated.”
More Positive Changes Experienced by the Households We Helped
Thanks to the funding from the Bernicia Foundation, households we have helped with free support over the past 12 months have experienced the following positive changes:-
Homes feel less cluttered and more orderly
Family members told us they feel more relaxed and settled at home
Family members disclosed having a ‘better home life’
The burden of household tasks was temporarily lifted for young carers so they could focus on other areas of their lives, such as homework, hobbies, and socialising. They felt that by ‘resetting’ the home, it had helped them to feel less overwhelmed
Parents told us they felt less anxious about their children’s wellbeing and the condition of their homes
Families said they felt better able to maintain the home going forwards, and felt more optimistic about the future and their quality of life had improved, despite the health of the person being cared for remaining unchanged.
We are really grateful to have received support from the Bernicia Foundation to deliver our first pilot as a charity, and make a difference in our community for young people and their families.
Everyone is different, that’s why Happy to Help Gateshead create home help plans that suit the needs of each client. Whatever you need, we’ll create a visit that keeps on doing what you need to live in safety and comfort in your own home.