“Massively thankful for people like you”
Community Food Hubs
Our Community Food Hubs are so much more than a place to gather food. They are place to come for a chat, meet people, have a cup of tea and find support. We regularly invite local support services to join us and over the last few weeks we’ve been delighted that the team from ‘Supporting You’ have been able to attend.
The Supporting You team are specialist trained advisors to help people access a wide range of help. This support includes income maximisation, debt advice, employment advice, budgeting support, and health and wellbeing advice. You can contact the team here or call 01243 534860.
Through our Community Food Hubs the Supporting You team met Hannah, and have been able to provide incredible support. Hannah disclosed that she was struggling to provide hot meals for her children and herself, as her oven was broken with just the hobs and grill working.
The Supporting You team at Chichester District Council, were able to provide her with white goods vouchers, via the West Sussex County Council Housing Support Fund to enable her to purchase a replacement cooker. The team were also able to provide her with advice on reducing her household expenditure, by contacting her water utility providers – Southern Water and Portsmouth Water – each of whom run a scheme to reduce the cost of their service where the customer is in receipt of Universal Credit (and some other benefits) or their annual income is less than £21,000. Her broadband provider, as a large number of them have, signed up to a Government initiative to offer discounted social tariff products to people receiving Universal Credit, Pension Credit and some other benefits. Both of these schemes are known as ‘social tariffs’.
In addition to all of the above the team advised Hannah to request additional help with her housing costs via the Discretionary Housing Payment scheme, to help meet the shortfall in her rent for her two bedroom property and the housing costs she receives from Universal Credit, which is limited to one bedroom as her children are not considered to be part of her household.
Hannah has been so incredibly grateful for the support saying “massively thankful for people like you”.
Hannah’s story is real but their name has been changed to protect their identity.
