This year the cost-of-living crisis has sent the price of food, gas and electricity rocketing.
This has forced people to make hard choices just to survive.
Heating or eating? Pay rent or go into debt?
We’ve heard directly from people who use our services who are facing these impossible choices more and more.
Together we have reflected and adapted our services to meet these new demands.
Our two money-focused projects, Made of Money and Money Guiders England Network were at the forefront of this response.
Money Guiders England Network
We welcomed the Money Guiders England Network as a new project this year, a partnership with the Money and Pensions Service. It supports and equips frontline professionals who provide unregulated money guidance in their role, through learning and development events and resources.
This helps to ensure more people have improved access to up-to-date guidance about money, which is more important than ever as the cost-of-living crisis deepens.
This year the team ran 25 events with a total of 420 attendees.
The network’s membership grew to 361 members from 228 organisations.
Event topics have included the cost of living, awareness of loan sharks and illegal lending, debt awareness, Universal Credit, self-employment and making numeracy more accessible.
Made of Money
Our Made of Money project runs courses to help people manage their money. These courses help families and individuals on a low income, as well as those with experience of homelessness and mental health difficulties.
Our approach goes beyond practical money management skills and helps people explore and reflect on their relationship with money too.
We run courses in London schools, community centres, housing associations and more, as well as providing workshops online.
This year we helped 148 families directly, reaching at least 210 children over 79 sessions. A post-course evaluation of respondents showed:
- 100% felt more confident with money
- 80% felt more confident to talk about money within the family
Responding to the cost-of-living crisis
As the cost-of-living crisis hit, people faced increasingly hard choices around what they were able to provide for their children, with limited resources, including food. We responded by:
- producing a compassionate guide on how to talk to your children about money, including having difficult conversations
- producing an online list of helpful tools and resources to help navigate the crisis which has been viewed by over 9,000 people
- providing nutritious food at in-person courses
In addition to working directly with people on low incomes, we provided training to professionals so they could use the insights from our work in their practice.
We trained 71 professionals over 11 sessions, further expanding our impact.