Care for Someone Joins Help2Fund

Getting women into work who were never given a fair shot at it. Care for Someone is the newest charity to join Help2Fund.

Who they are

Care for Someone mentor and coach women who are shut out of the job market, and have been doing it since 2001. Their focus is on women from groups that are consistently underrepresented in employment: Black, Asian and minority ethnic women, women leaving prison, refugees, and women from low income backgrounds.

The charity's stated aim is to raise aspirations, which can sound like a euphemism until you look at what it means in practice. A woman who has applied for forty jobs and heard nothing back has not developed a personality problem. She has developed an accurate model of her own prospects, and the work is partly about changing the prospects and partly about changing the model.

How the work actually goes

It is slow, unglamorous, one-to-one work. Mentoring and coaching, conducted over months rather than in a single workshop, alongside employability events and practical resources.

There is a reason it is structured that way. Short employability programmes are cheap to run and produce good completion statistics, and for someone who mostly needs a CV tidied up they work fine. For a woman coming out of prison, or one who arrived in the country four years ago and has never been through a UK interview process, the barrier is not a formatting problem. It is confidence, networks, the unwritten rules, and a long run of evidence that the door does not open. None of that shifts in an afternoon.

What Care for Someone does instead is put one person alongside one woman and stay there. It does not produce dramatic quarterly numbers. It changes what the next ten years look like for the woman on the other end of it.

Zimbabwe

Alongside the UK work, Care for Someone fund education for young people in Zimbabwe. It is a smaller strand of what they do but it comes from the same place: the belief that the constraint on most people is opportunity rather than ability, and that the cheapest point to intervene is usually earlier than anyone does.

Where your money goes

Care for Someone's costs are mostly people and rooms rather than equipment, so donations translate fairly directly into contact hours with the women they support.

A donation helps a woman access resources, attend an event, receive mentoring, or get the coaching that builds her confidence back up to the point where she will apply for the job she is already qualified for.

You can donate on their Help2Fund page: help2fund.org/donations/care-for-someone

Volunteering

Care for Someone need volunteers to help with fundraising, organising events and writing social media content. If you have professional experience in any of those areas and a few hours to give, that is directly useful to a charity this size.

More about the charity at careforsomeone.org.uk

About Help2Fund

Help2Fund is a free platform that gives small registered charities in England and Wales promotional support and fundraising infrastructure they would otherwise have to pay for. It is run by a team of volunteers, and the support is personalised to each charity rather than sold as a fixed package: some partners want social media content, some want a donation page, some want help telling a story they have never had the time to write down. Nothing is ever published without the charity signing it off first. In-person volunteering sessions with our partner charities are planned for the future.

Talent is not the thing in short supply here. Opportunity is. Care for Someone has spent twenty-five years closing that gap one woman at a time, which is slower than anyone would like and considerably more durable than the alternatives.