PROFESSIONALS
Reach out
Read my lips – over £1.5 million Lottery funding for South East
The South East is sharing in over £1.5 million in Lottery good cause funding from the Big Lottery Fund’s Reaching Communities programme.
SAdAS is notified they have been awarded lottery funding to open a new service (Reach Out) to provide long-term counselling and family support for people affected by drug and alcohol misuse. Key to the service will be to help families recover and rebuild the family unit working across the County of Surrey.
Reach Out is aiming for a least one support group in each of the County’s 11 local Boroughs. Easily accessible venues will be chosen for education, advice and support for the service users and their families.
Venues – watch this space for the address in each location
- Elmbridge
- Epsom and Ewell
- Guildford
- Mole Valley
- Reigate and Banstead
- Runnymede
- Spelthorne
- Surrey Heath
- Tandridge
- Waverley
- Woking
Reach Out Aims
The project aims to achieve 2 of the Reaching Communities as follows:
Stronger communities with more active citizens working together to tackle their problems;
By setting up and running a minimum of 11 support groups and networks in different community locations that focus on raising awareness of drug/alcohol issues, providing education and peer support should enable those people to tackle and address ongoing issues locally and over time provide wider ongoing support to other members in their community.
Healthier and more active people and communities;
Both the counselling and group work will use an outcome tool for service users and family members to measure their progress on the following areas;
- Increasing personal responsibility
- Reduction, stability or abstinence of drug and or alcohol use resulting in positive change
- Improving mental/emotional and physical health
- decreases in criminality
- improvement in relationships, social networks/contacts
- improvement in accommodation/living circumstances
- improvement in daily lifestyle e.g. work, education, training, leisure time
Making changes in some or all of these areas will result in healthier and functioning individuals who can become more active in a number of ways, as well as contribute to the support of others and give something in return to their local communities by contributing to ongoing support or simply because a significant change in their behaviour has a positive benefit on their families and local communities.
Criteria
- Provide confidential one to one counselling to individuals using alcohol and / or drugs
- Provide confidential one to one counselling to individuals affected by some else’s use
- Age range 16+
- Facilitate group work across 11 Boroughs of the County for those wishing to address their drinking and drug use and family members
- Develop support networks across 11 Boroughs of the County for those wishing to address their drinking and drug use
- Develop sustainable family support networks in 11 Boroughs of the County to enable them in turn to educate and provide support on drug and / or alcohol issues within their communities
Networking
- Work with children’s and adult services to reintegrate families into mainstream and support services e.g. education, training work, health etc
- Reach Out will prevent the ‘pass the parcel’ approach by enabling all issues to be looked at together, or worked through a joint care planned approach e.g. addressing housing, debt needs whilst SAdAS counselling will help the individual change behaviour e.g. anger management, substance use) and recovery needs e.g. employment needs
- GP’s
- NHS Community Drug and Alcohol Teams
- Service User (FOCUS) meetings
- NA / AA / CA / Adfam
- Surrey Drug Care
- Xchange
- Yellow Pages and local directories
- SAdAS Website
Volunteers
If you are a counsellor interested in volunteering for Reach Out please download the volunteer application form found in the ‘About SAdAS’ section of the website.
Watch this page for updates on Reach Out.
