Lido Foundation is an anchor organisation for many of our users; we have over nine years of trusted relationships with local communities. We are often the first point of contact for many of our users. Our welfare and housing community advisors are from our primary beneficiaries’ communities with a deep level of lived experience; also, half of our trustees are service users, bringing lived experience to our strategic directions.

We have been providing effective housing advice, financial advice, and support to local residents to enable them to understand and exercise their legal rights and entitlements. We are mainly working with BAME communities, but not exclusively, as our services are open to all. Due to the cost-of-living crisis, our users have increased, and we have seen people in desperate situations who had to make difficult decisions to get food on the table for their families or to heat their homes. Our users are mainly black women, who are one of the lowest socioeconomic groups in the UK.

We are trusted by our users who are mainly BAME women including Somalis, Ethiopians, Caribbean people, and other BAME people, will be our main beneficiaries. We will work with local food banks and emergency essential items providers to ensure that clients receive items that can get them through the winter. 

Most of our beneficiaries are BAME women with many large families, with limited knowledge of how to use computers to make claims, pay rent, and scan documents required by Universal Credit, and our advisor spends many hours instructing or supporting people just filling out documents. Therefore, it is important to ensure people gain the skills and necessary knowledge in the future to be self-sufficient, and we are supporting beneficiaries to access courses and opportunities to develop skills by undertaking skills audits of clients and then working with them to access the right courses and opportunities.

Lido Foundation has an open-door policy for our service users, and we provide opportunities for the local community to suggest comments or ideas through our suggestions box. We also organise a well-attended AGM per year where the local community has a meaningful say in our work and future project development. The majority of our projects are from local users who, based on local needs, suggest what would be most beneficial.

We often take a consultative participatory approach by consulting with beneficiaries to improve the programme, where we deliver regular evaluation feedback forms to our service users and hold focus groups with clients to receive informal and unfiltered responses about the project and their personal experiences as beneficiaries.