COVID 19 has had a huge impact on the work of Riverside and the families we support. We’ve taken a moment to reflect on how the last few months have been, what we’ve learnt and how we’ll be moving forward
The early few weeks of lockdown caused huge amounts of upheaval for our families, with many needing to access foodbanks and care parcels from ourselves and partners. With the doors closed to our centre we had to quickly adjust our services to be able to effectively reach out to our community
Impact on our community
Many people we support have not been able to access their usual support networks and have faced financial hardship due to loss of work and income overnight.
One family we supported had just moved house and had their third baby; when the pandemic hit, the father lost his job. They had budgeted for small emergencies, but nothing prepared them for the impact of no income. Foodbanks, vouchers for baby milk and care parcels supported them for the short term, but they needed help to plan for the longer term as the pandemic continued. We did an income/expenditure exercise with the family to look at where they could tighten up on finances, and thanks to a few phone calls made on their behalf we managed to get certain payments reduced, such as gas and electric. We continue to support the family as they work to increase their independence and get back to being in control of their finances.
Many of the people we work with are asylum-seeking families who are used to meeting us for face to face support and for us to help them to find other services that might help them. Not being able to meet face to face until recently was often difficult for people who don’t speak English well.
For example, one woman who doesn’t speak any English communicated with us by notes which she’d take home to her husband to translate. The loss of this face to face work and relationship building has been difficult for many to adjust to; it has been difficult for some people to move to remote ways of communicating such as phone calls, Zoom meetings and emails. We are now able to do a limited amount of face to face meetings in a COVID safe environment so that those who don’t speak English or feel able to use electronic communication can get appropriate support.
Providing essential digital access
Access to digital equipment has been a big problem with many families not able to afford laptops and tablets, or the data contracts needed to use them. Some children were faced with being unable to keep up with school work without this technology. Some people lacked the confidence and skills to use them. Fortunately we’ve been able to access grants to fund equipment and data, and have delivered them directly to families to use. Sometimes where people have needed help in setting up or how to use them we’ve been able to invite them by appointment to the centre and staff have got them up and running.
Moving our services online
Much of our work has had to adapt to being delivered online in a very short timeframe. At first many people didn’t want to engage with services online, finding the early days of lockdown very stressful and needing a lot of encouragement to use technology. However as the situation went on, they did respond to our offers of support.
One of the first things we did was to quickly set up an Early Years Facebook page for parents and 40 families have engaged with this on an ongoing basis to get support, advice and ideas on parenting. The private online space has allowed parents to share experiences and concerns, and we’ve been able to support them during lockdown with activities and information, advice and activities. Activities have included ideas on cooking with kids to keep them entertained and recipes on a budget. The feedback has been great, with families sending in photos and videos of them taking part.
Baby massage sessions which are now delivered via Zoom have gone down well, up to ten families attend each group. This was described as a surreal experience by Ayshea our member of staff delivering the session, sitting in front of a laptop camera in an attic room with her massage baby doll!
We also had to adapt the way we delivered our Best Summer Ever programme as we usually have big fun days organised in local green spaces and family trips; due to COVID 19 we had to change to activity packs that could be easily transported and delivered to 200 children within the community.
We’ve created a large range of online training courses that would have normally been delivered in the classroom and instead have switched to Zoom, including mental health, dementia and understanding autism. All of these new sessions have good take-up and we are delighted to be getting good feedback.
For those not able to access online sessions we’ve printed out activity packs and posted them out or hand-delivered them. We’re trying to make sure no one slips through the net by contacting families by phone who are on our records but haven’t engaged with our services since lockdown. More families are accessing online services as we move forward. Staff have been incredible in adapting to these new ways of working, their roles changed overnight from face to face working to quickly learning and setting up brand new IT systems and running online sessions. One of the positives reported has been improved communication with our partner organisations as we work together better and share resources and ideas.
So what’s next?
We’re excited about our September online programme of activities for Early Years which will be backed up by us delivering packs to houses to support them. Messy Mondays will see families make things like Playdough; all of the ingredients for this will be delivered in their packs. Boogie Bairn sessions will see us create a fabulous sensory experience for little ones in the form of an online musical disco with a bag of instruments sent out to houses beforehand.
Currently the centre is being renovated, which was delayed from its expected start in March. So we will continue to deliver our services and support our community in these new ways for a little while yet. We are hoping that we can have face to face group sessions early in the New Year, ensuring a COVID safe environment.
In the meantime if you need to reach us, here are our contact details, and look out on our Facebook page for the latest on our current activities.