Money Matters
What is financial capability?
We have all heard saying like look after the pennies and the pounds look after themselves. Learning to manage your money is a vital life skill. It is important that people have the confidence and competence to budget effectively, manage expenditure, build savings and learn to plan for the future.
Financial education is so important that the Government has now introduced financial capability on the curriculum in all maintained secondary schools in England from September 2014. Our young people and children will have the opportunity to learn vital life skills much earlier in life.
Why we work with financial capability
Debt has always been one the most common enquiries received by Citizens Advice and with the economic downturn set to go on, debts continue to spiral out of control. Here at Citizens Advice Hammersmith & Fulham we want to prevent problems from arising in the first place and want to equip people with the skills and confidence to make informed decisions about their money, about taking credit, about budgeting better and planning for the future. We want to integrate money management within our advice service to ensure that people are helped earlier and not only when they reach crisis point.
How we work
We recruit volunteers from the community and provide them with training to become fully competent trainers. They then go out into the community and deliver training on financial capability through our various projects, building skills and resilience in their own communities.
We deliver multiple projects that help people manage their money better. These are funded by many different funders, some have specific remits and are for particular user groups and others are more generally available to everyone. Details of our projects can be found on our projects page.
Where we work
We work across Hammersmith and Fulham and West London.
If you are interested in attending a session, please get in touch with chris.marsh@citizensadvicehf.org.uk
How you can get involved
You could become a community trainer delivering benefits directly to your own community. If you are interested in joining us in the fight against poverty and running managing money sessions across Hammersmith and Fulham and west London, please get in touch with phil.storey@citizensadvicehf.org.uk and ask for an application to volunteer… remember to make it clear you would like to volunteer for financial capability.