Uttlesford Community Action Network is the charity at the heart of our community. Our primary mission is to reduce loneliness and isolation amongst our population and enable people to live independent but supported and connected lives.
We achieve this by delivering services for Uttlesford residents – many of which use relatively small interventions to achieve a huge impact.
Our Community Response Team undertake practical tasks that can make life a little easier, ranging from basic household repairs and home improvements, to garden rescues and emergency shopping and prescriptions. We also have a bank of volunteer Telephone Befrienders and volunteer Walking Buddies to help you stay connected with your community.
Ticket Home CIC is our social enterprise subsidiary created to help the NHS with managing patient flow and supporting patients on their journey home. We currently deliver Ticket Home support at Addenbrooks Hospital using dedicated in-hospital Social Prescribing Link Workers to assess patient needs and start to plan for their discharge from the day of admission. In the build-up to going home we put everything in place that you need such as key safes for carer access, moving furniture, delivery of equipment, cleaning the property and making sure everything is in good order – so the heating, lighting and water are all working. We provide wrap-around support for up to fourteen days after you leave hospital with things like hot meal deliveries, shopping and prescriptions and weekly welfare calls.
Home Solutions is our new service that provides help in the home, enabling residents to continue to live independently. Our staff can undertake weekly domestic tasks for you – such as cleaning, shopping, laundry and occasional handy man tasks like basic repairs, changing lightbulbs, installing digital devices and smoke alarms/carbonmonoxide detectors. We can also cut the grass and tidy the garden. This is a fee paying service, but all the proceeds from UCAN Home Solutions are reinvested in our community support programmes.
UCAN Volunteer is our volunteering service for Uttlesford, recruiting and managing UCAN’s own volunteers, but also acting as a broker for other charities and voluntary groups in Uttlesford who depend on volunteer support to achieve their goals. We also work alongside employers to increase volunteering amongst the workforce and demonstrate the benefits to business of staff volunteering.
This is just a taste of the important work that we do every day in Uttlesford to help local people to get the very best from life. We also work in partnership with other voluntary organisations and groups to grow and strengthen the voluntary sector, and have a team on standby to respond to crisis situations like the evacuation of Sudan, the Afghanistan crisis and currently the war in Ukraine – all of which impact on our community and our way of life, as refugees are channeled through Stansted Airport to places of safety.
Get Involved
There are lots of ways you can support us in our mission. Volunteer, Make A Donation or support us at an event. To find out more about how you can help us to help others email connect@ucan.org.uk
Thank you.