Gateway to helping families in poverty

As a charity dedicated to supporting lone parent, vulnerable and disadvantaged families, Fife Gingerbread’s staff are no stranger to speaking with people who are at crisis point – and often this is rooted in poverty.

One project it runs in Levenmouth is The Gateway – an early-intervention partnership project funded by Big Lottery, providing family mentoring and family learning opportunities to families in Levenmouth with children between P5 and S2.

Wilson Macduff, 52, family learning coordinator, said: “From a learning point of view, the greatest challenge for families that are struggling and faced with poverty is access to opportunities. That’s often compounded by their sense of isolation and their inability to reach out to the wider community, and to basically pay for things for their children to participate in – learning or socialising activities. So a lot of what I do in family learning is making opportunities for families to come together as accessible as possible, so there’s never any costs in what we do.

“There’s always access to food and, as far as possible, there’s access to child care, as much as we can make that available, and transport as well.”

Mr Wilson said his work is based on the assumption that families can’t afford to access those opportunities. That inability to pay compounds their isolation. “As a result, family learning is pretty much predicated on those ideas – that when we can establish that access is available to families, their opportunities to learn and have time together is increased,” he added.

“It doesn’t really tackle poverty, per se, but it does acknowledge they are suffering in that way and we need to still be quite mindful of it.”

Janice Smith, family mentor, said: “Some of the clubs we do are specifically food oriented. So in the school holidays, once a week we have a lunchtime club which, again, is an opportunity for families to come, have activities that are free and there’s a lunch made for them.

“We have corporate support with that – Kettle Produce give us veg packs that families can take home. The Old Manor Hotel makes us big pots of soup and Sainsbury’s give us the bread.

“We’ll also do things like food nutrition and the skills of making a pot of soup or making your budget stretch.

“We also do a bit of food hygiene for parents – a wee boost that can lead to employability and a way out of poverty.

“With fuel poverty, we’ll refer to Cosy Kingdom and Greener Kirkcaldy if people are talking about fuel bills. Child maintenance is also increasingly an issue we’ve campaigned around.”