The Hackney Congolese Women Support Group (HCWSG) has over the years benefited from number of services offered by Hackney CVS. This includes core training around safeguarding followed by one-to-one support. Organisational Development support helped us to better understand good governance for small charities. We have had support with developing and updating policies and procedures to operate effectively. Also, Hackney CVS  assisted us in securing funds.

In addition, they provide online meetings and conferences around local issues affecting our community and provided us with opportunities to network with local community and statutory services in Hackney.

Through free as well as low-cost training courses we were able to attend all the Safeguarding and Health and Safety trainings, which benefitted HCWSG trustees. It helped our trustees and volunteers to receive core essential trainings. This in turn helped us to enhance our existing knowledge and skills. The trainings increased our capacity and ability to analyse and to try out different methods while carrying out our work.

Attending the courses and achieving the awards and certificates for safeguarding and Health and Safety boosted the trustees and volunteers’  confidence level.

Having these certificates meant that we have now fulfilled all our legal requirements that were necessary for our organisation to operate optimally. The new skills gained helped the trustees and volunteers to develop the confidence needed to start new projects as well as putting in new funding applications.

We managed to successfully deliver a Cost of Living Crisis project during Covid, and was able to support members of Congolese community impacted by the cost of living crisis. We distributed food parcel by going door to door and supplying them with food and essentials.

Hackney CVS’s Organisational Development support contributed massively to our fundraising efforts as well as helping us to address the key development needs of our organisation.

Starting from providing advice around good governance, they helped us with our funding application from start to finish. The staff member was attentive, professional, and demonstrated particularly good understanding of the issues small organisation experience. Every time I call or approached them face to face, they were always eager to listen and keen to resolve any situations.

At the time of our fundraising application, we had to send them our application many times for proofreading and we used to call them every time we needed a chat when developing our concepts, and making sure we understood the requirements of the funding application.

We were successful in two of our funding applications which will help support Congolese community in Hackney. These added resources will help us to help the most vulnerable in our community as many of them do not have enough money to feed their families and others are on low income, who cannot afford to purchase one meal a day. By offering a combination of warm food and dry-non-perishable food we hope to assist our community in this difficult time.