make a difference in our community
Hope helps everyone in our community, not just people in need. How?
Our main focus is, of course, to help those who have nothing, who are suffering, poor, excluded or homeless. But people only reach that point because other support and help, whether from their family and friends, or from the wider community and other services, have failed. We are the back-stop, the end: we pick up the pieces of people society has let slip through every crack.
People who attend services like Hope are far less likely to die early, and to develop worse health problems – we help to intervene and assist earlier than it might have been. We help reduce demand and costs on the NHS. This is true for both physical and mental health problems.
When people are with us we work on their addictions and their offending, and this reduces the volume of crime, anti-social behaviour and nuisance in the community. We keep people off the streets and in a place where their behaviour is influenced by good example and help. We help reconcile people with their families and encourage their participation in their social work or health care. Our service users maintain gardens for older people.
By getting people to do training and volunteering, and improve their employability, and in some cases, help them to get jobs, we help reduce the burden of welfare to society. We save the state money.
By the things we do, we improve the environment of Northampton. We pick up local litter; in Hope Tools we recycle garden tools otherwise headed to landfill; in our kitchens we utilise food that otherwise supermarkets would throw away, reducing food waste; at our gardening project, where we have brought derelict urban land back into productive use, we grow food, with less food miles, for people in need, including families and older people; we recycle clothes through our charity shop.
By using volunteers, we give skills and confidence to a wide range of people looking for experience, social opportunities and expression for their skills and qualities.
By working with schools and young people we provide education. By offering placement experience to vocational students, we contribute to those professions. By running art groups, showing films, and undertaking or sponsoring art projects, we create beauty and improve culture.
We contribute to wider strategic efforts by partnerships and groups to improve Northampton’s food and the influence and status of the wider voluntary sector.
Overall, by being a community charity, owned and supported by the people of our county, and doing with this almost no state or local government aid, we build community cohesion and wellbeing.
You can read the most recent report on our social impact here
