Kiveton Park Independent Advice Centre

Kiveton Park Independent Advice Centre is a successful advice centre serving many local people and often deprived communities in Rotherham.

The centre, established in 1983, offers a wide range of core services with the help of three paid staff and nine volunteers. The services include free legal advice sessions run by volunteer solicitors, drop-in sessions set up in highly deprived areas of Rotherham as well as home visits for housebound and particularly vulnerable clients.

Grant support from the Loscar Wind Farm Community Fund has enabled the centre to make essential improvements to their existing service provision at their base offices in Kiveton Park.

The funding has helped increase our efficiency. We bought a new computer, text books, provided training to our staff members and volunteers and invested in specialised software, which enables us to carry out benefit calculations which used to take us hours, in less than 10 minutes.

One thing we’re also trying to do is to change our model slightly. We currently have people referred to us from all over Rotherham who are unable to travel to Kiveton Park. Therefore we need to increase the amount of outreach work we do across Rotherham

Carl Perlstrom, Centre Co-ordinator

With these advanced resources in place the advice centre predicts it will be able to provide 100 to 150 more interventions over the course of the year. Taking their estimated number of clients helped so far up by the centre up to 1,800.