Energise Families

Energise Families aims to encourage families to become more active through volunteer befriending support.

In Hounslow, our trained volunteer befrienders are matched to local families. They work to listen to and support families through the challenges of life. Being a parent is a tough job and we help families move towards better relationships, resilience and routines. We aim to improve parent’s self-esteem, helping them to understand that there is no such thing as the perfect parent, building on their strengths to be a ‘good enough’ parent in a happier household. To help achieve this, our dedicated volunteers meet families weekly, either face to face or by phone, for up to 6 months – providing 1:1 befriending.

However, Energise Families is more than just befriending support. Our volunteers gently encourage families to become more active together with lots of tips and ideas about how to participate, and we provide equipment to make being active a lot more fun and easy in their home, garden or local park. We also support them to attend fun activities that are local, low-cost and accessible, and when families are uncertain about attending, our volunteers can go with them to build their confidence and slowly encourage them to attend by themselves. We then use these community activities to help build parent’s social networks so that they have a local support network they can rely on after our service has finished.

Our befrienders can:

• Listen to parents talk to about their challenges and help to find solutions. 

• Provide a friendly, non-judgemental and confidential space for talking. 

• Chat through ideas about what to do if the parent is experiencing challenging behaviour from their children   

• Work out how to set routines and boundaries to make family life smoother. 

• Talk through ways to improve family relationships. 

• Encourage the family to become active together, either in the home or outside  

• Find fun, low cost activities to do as a family in the local area 

• Provide equipment for fun activities 

• Provide ideas for play at home and outside  

• Work through practical issues with the family, like grant applications or registering with a GP