Success stories
Mujib Osmani, Threshold Housing Advice Centre
Mujib Osmani is a Housing Adviser at Threshold Housing Advice Centre. Mujib regularly uses Lasa's advice line. He called Lasa's Advice Line to consult about a housing benefit case.
His client was a single parent with 5 children. She was renting a 4 bedroom private accommodation in the Golders Green area. Although she was claiming income support, with no savings, and her weekly rent was within the local housing allowance limit, Local Authorities' restricted her claim far below her actual rent. As a result she had large rent arrears and her landlord threatened to take possession proceedings.
Mujib also called Lasa's Advisers line many times to seek further advice in relation to Disability Living Allowance, Attendance Allowance, Incapacity Benefit, housing cost for homeowners, non dependent deductions etc.
Mujib says:
We are housing experts at Threshold Housing Advice Centre, but people often come to us with related questions about welfare issues which are not housing related.
When these problems are compounded they can affect our clients' access to housing claims and it is important for us to help. Lasa often provides the information we need and our clients are able to resolve their difficulties.
Lasa offers advice on the phone and provides a follow-up email detailing all of the information that we need to support our clients' requirements. We are always very grateful for their support.
Lisa Davies, The Albert Kennedy Trust
Lisa is a Placement Worker at The Albert Kennedy Trust. When a seventeen year old woman (estranged from her mother) was refused income support Lisa needed guidance on current legislation, in order to appeal the decision.
Lisa turned to Lasa for the advice she needed and the appeal was won. This enabled the young woman to continue her college studies with a roof over her head. The successful appeal also enabled the Albert Kennedy Trust to recoup costs, which can help another vulnerable young person.
Lisa says:
I have called on Lasa on many occasions to get the law clarified and have found the information to be timely and correct. If Lasa wasn't there this would impact on the quality of service I can give to my clients.
Mel Morris, Southwark Council, Integrated Children's Support Services says:
I always know that Lasa is there whenever I need them to help or to reiterate welfare benefit information on complex cases.
Gary Vaux, Herts County Council
Gary is Head of Advice (benefits and work) at Herts County Council. His team recently used the discussion forums on Lasa's Rightsnet service to advise a family, where the grandparents had trouble accessing benefits for their grandchildren, although they were the main carers.
Gary says:
Lasa's advice really helped. We passed on the information and the grandparents were helped to get the benefits and tax credits that they needed and are better able to provide for the children properly.
We also learned information which we could use to update our own files, and so Lasa's advice means we are better equipped to handle similar cases in the future.
Without Lasa, keeping up-to-date with changes in the welfare benefit system would be very difficult. We would have to research the information ourselves and this would cost a lot of staff hours and greatly reduce the effectiveness of our service, here at Herts County Council.
Stephen Hawkins, Age Concern Hounslow
When Age Concern Hounslow needed to replace our technology and develop staff training, we turned to Lasa for advice and help.
Age Concern Hounslow became part of the Circuit Riders' Project and this enabled us to deal with our hardware and training needs. They replaced a ‘crumbling and under-used network ‘and improved the speed and efficiency of dealings with service users, the public and other agencies.
We developed a more strategic view of how we use technology with staff and volunteers as well as with service-users who benefitted from a new resource: an internet café. We worked with Lasa and Age Concern London to develop this.
Stephen found the quality of services of Age Concern Hounslow were improved and that the older people now have more involvement in using the internet to communicate with friends and relatives.
The success of the project helped Age Concern Hounslow to win a major council contract. The charity also found that the new systems allowed them to deliver more information and advice even in times when money was tight.
Keith Sangster, Paragon Housing (Elmbridge Housing Trust)
Keith Sangster is a benefits support worker with Paragon housing which is based in Walton-on-Thames. Lasa helped Keith to increase and develop his welfare benefits knowledge through training and support.
As a result Keith has been able to successfully challenge benefits decisions on behalf of clients and received very positive feedback from external inspectors.
Keith says:
Lasa is an invaluable source of knowledge and training that could not be easily replicated. I cannot thank or praise everyone at Lasa enough and my own success has to be shared with you.
Matt Collins, Training and Communications Manager, Chance UK
Chance UK is a charity that provides mentoring services for children aged 5-11 with behavioural difficulties. Matt says:
Lasa helped us to look at our options for moving our technology to the cloud after they responded to a question we posed on twitter. Lasa was signposted us to some really useful resources on their ICT knowledgebase including: Cloud Computing 101 (which helped us understand what cloud computing is and isn't); and What Should Third Sector Organisations be Thinking About With Regard to the Cloud? (which gave us a balanced overview of the potential, pros, cons and other issues to think about when considering moving to the cloud).
Through our Building Bridges to IT Excellence project Lasa was then able to help Chance UK further and invited them a scoping meeting.
Here we clarified what their goals were. Chance UK has 15 staff operating out of 2 offices with a very slow and unreliable connection between these offices.
Lasa was able to give us more in depth information about the availability and potential of free and paid-for cloud tools and services to achieve our goal of better connecting our two offices so we can improve internal communication and collaboration and deliver our services more effectively. Lasa also helped us explore the issues we would need to take into account when considering migrating to the cloud. This helped us make informed decisions about whether migrating some or all of our technology to the cloud would be a good move for us.
Lasa provided us with key support tools like the Lasa Technology Handbook and put us in touch with a group in Edinburgh that have moved to using Google's cloud applications (e.g. Google Docs, Gmail, Google Calendar etc.) so they could share their experiences with us. It's early days yet for Chance UK to assess the full benefits and impact of moving our technology to the cloud. However, armed with the information we now have, we are able to progress to next steps. These include assessing tenders for various cloud based solutions. Through the process we've learned that there are a lot of options out there and now feel much better equipped to choose and implement a solution that's right for us, and negotiate affordable options.
If you have a press enquiry about Lasa's case studies please contact Zoe Amar on zamar@lasa.org.uk or 0207 426 4488.