Sage Family Support
What is Sage Family Support?
Sage Family Support has been developed to work across health and education services, to help families who are experiencing difficulties to get the right help, at the time they need it most. For example, if a parent is finding it difficult to manage their child's behaviour, project workers can provide practical support on working with their child to improve the situation. Alternatively, if a parent is experiencing difficulties within their child's school, workers can work with the school and the family to help solve the problems, providing practical support to link families with services and organisations.
What is unique about Sage Family Support?
The project is unique because it works with families, schools and health professionals together, to provide services based on the family's needs, treating each family as special and unique. In particular the project:
- facilitates the inclusion of families into services and activities appropriate to their needs;
- is based on families' needs - i.e. families define their needs, which are then translated into individual or family action plans. This entails working with individuals and families to define and implement their own solutions;
- provides support to families to set and achieve realistic goals within a specific timeframe, which is reviewed monthly with the family; and
- helps families to develop their own support networks, by facilitating a supported peer mentoring element.
What does Sage Family Support do?
The project is open to all families living in Downham and Bellingham, regardless of age. We are especially keen to support families who feel isolated, perhaps because they are new to the area or because they feel they are the only ones experiencing difficulties with family life or perhaps because they have a whole range of worries that seem too big to manage on their own.
It has one main aim, to support families in need to access relevant support services, to work together to help them, in whatever way they need.
The project achieves this through:
- individual support in the family home with experienced and knowledgeable project workers;
- employing link workers to work with local families, community workers and service providers;
- developing outreach health and education information/advice sessions for families; and
- developing one-to-one intensive support for families who are experiencing a range of difficulties that cannot be resolved by one agency alone and bringing agencies together to help support families through a single point of access.
How does Sage Family Support help families in need of support?
Since October 2003 the project has helped families in a whole range of ways, from supporting them to develop ways to help manage their children's behaviour, to helping them into adult education classes and assisting them to access additional benefits available to them.
Common areas of support have included:
- supporting more than 50 people into training including medical training, nursing, midwifery, first aid, massage, English, ICT and others;
- providing advice and support to help parents to manage health-related issues concerning their children e.g. safety, accidents, sleep, and nutrition;
- providing practical support and guidance on pre-school selection/issues arising from children entering pre-school provision;
- debt management;
- issues around well-being, such as stress management, behavioural problems, drug dependency and drug and alcohol misuse; and
- helping families to access specialist services, such as domiciliary sexual health services, ESOL and refugee support workers and specialist counselling services.
How can I find out more about Sage Family Support?
To find out more please contact Anne Coppendale on 07595 863041 .