NAWRA conference

We are really proud to be hosting the National Association of Welfare Rights Advisers (NAWRA) conference in Coventry on Friday 1st December 2017.

NAWRA brings together advisers from across the UK for a day of workshops, guest speakers and information sharing.  We expect to welcome around 100 advisers from organisations including charities like ourselves, local authority staff, Citizens Advice teams and other welfare services.  It should be a fantastic day!

We would like to thank Tina Wukics, from the Partnership for Coventry, for her support in helping to arrange the event and to all the people who have given up their time to deliver workshops and speaker sessions.  Thank you all!

Coventry Food Charter

In April 2017, The Trussell Trust reported that their network of 428 food banks gave out nearly a record number of 1.2 million three-day emergency food supplies.

Issues of hunger, poverty and injustice are at the forefront of debate right now.  One recent development is the Coventry Food Charter, which sets out a vision for what we can do about food poverty if we work together.  It recognises the need to deal with both emergency food crises and the development of a sustainable and secure food system, the centrality of the universal right to food and the aim of achieving food justice.

There will be a public launch of the Coventry Food Charter on Thursday 16 November 2017 between 5pm-7pm at St. Mary’s Guildhall.  The launch is free to attend but you must sign up on Eventbrite.

Also of interest is a recent report by Rachel Loopstra & Doireann Lalor, from Oxford University, that considers many of the issues around injustice and UK hunger.  The report, published jointly with the Trussell Trust, ‘Financial insecurity, food insecurity, and disability: the profile of people receiving emergency food assistance from The Trussell Trust Foodbank Network in Britain‘, is an essential read.

Privacy and data protection

In order to deal with your problems, and to help us demonstrate the value of our service, we may ask to collect and store personal and sensitive information about you.

To give more information about the reasons why we might need to collect information about you, and what we will do with that information, we have updated the privacy and data protection page on our website.

Advice in Canley

Unfortunately, due to staffing changes and access difficulties, we have reluctantly had to suspend our ‘drop-in’ advice service from Canley Children’s Centre at Charter Primary School.

The nearest alternative session is now at Tile Hill Children’s Centre/Family Hub in Jardin Crescent.  That advice session is every Wednesday, from 9.30am.

We do hope to return to Canley in the near future and will post details here if the situation changes.

We would like to thank all the staff at the Children’s Centre and at Charter Primary School for their support.

Details of all alternative advice sessions can be found at https://covadvice.org.uk/advice/advice-calendar/