Reading Citizens Advice Bureau

General information

Citizens Advice Reading

An independent charity supporting local people.

For over 75 years we’ve been giving free, confidential and impartial advice to the people of Reading - helping them to help themselves.

Anyone in Reading can use our service and each year around 8,000 people find they need the help of our highly-trained volunteers, who help them with around 20,000 different problems.

What surprises many is that we’re an independent charity - not a Government agency. We receive no national funding and depend on local funding and donations for our survival.

Advice is available face-to-face, over the telephone and online. We help people who are struggling with debt, housing, employment, discrimination and benefits. Our support frequently changes their lives - it can keep the roof over their heads.

But we don’t just sit and wait for problems - we also work hard to prevent them. We give ‘money awareness’ training to young people, we build links to vulnerable groups, and spot emerging issues which we take to national level to influence Government policy.

Across the country around half of the population has used Citizens Advice services at one time or another. You may be one of the people we’ve helped, or one of the lucky ones who haven’t yet needed us.

The demand for our service is already greater than we can meet, and the economic downturn and the Government’s Welfare Reform programme have increased this even further.

Last year we had to turn away over 2,500 people because we just didn’t have the resources to help them.

It costs £1,500 and takes 12 months to train a volunteer to be a high-quality adviser.

Each year we need to raise £240,000 to give free advice to the people of Reading and we rely on local funding and donations.

We stretch our income as far as it will go, but our existing sources of funding are becoming more uncertain and despite our constant efforts to find new funding we cannot keep pace with the growing demand for our help.

Imagine losing your job, running into financial difficulties, or having an accident that left you unable to cope, with no-one to turn to for advice?

How you can help

Every £25 raised will enable us to extend our service to one more person in need of our help.

If you value the service we provide, please help us. You can donate:

• Cash in one of our collection tins
• Text RCAB01 and the amount you would like to donate to 70070
• Online using the Local giving logo on our website rcab.org.uk

If you would like to know more about our work please visit our website rcab.org.uk