You need to be employed in the UK social care sector in a role that is involved in or supports the provision of adult, elderly or disability care, such as:
- Residential social care
- Domiciliary/home care
- Supported living care
- Daycare
- Private care
- If you work in a children’s social care service you may be eligible for a grant, provided the service you work for is not in Education or NHS or a local authority provision. These job roles include, Residential Childcare Worker, Senior Residential Care Support Worker, Support Worker. Staff who work in private nurseries are not eligible for a grant from us.
You may be eligible for a grant if:
- You are currently employed within the care sector and are experiencing mental health issues; these include anxiety, stress, burn-out, PTSD, addiction and other mental health issues
Please do not apply if:
- You are already receiving counselling/therapy at the time of applying
- You are an NHS employee or qualified nurse
In order for your application to be assessed please ensure you provide the following:
- A letter of support.
- Talk to your GP, mental health support service or regulated professional (such as a social worker, or CPN or similar), because you will need to include a letter of support from one of them when you make your application, and they will need to confirm that you would benefit from support with your mental health and that this programme would be beneficial to you. If you have previously had support for mental health issues you could also ask that provider to give you a letter of support
- In order for you not to incur costs in having a letter from your GP: if you have an online log-in to your health provider (for example, if you are requesting repeat medication via an online portal) a screen shot or photo of a recent note from your GP confirming your need for mental health support and endorsing your application to our programme, would be fine.
The following table sets out the different stages of your application once it is submitted to us
*These timings are an approximation only; it depends on how many applications we have received and how many are currently being processed
|
Status of your
application |
What does this mean? |
Timeline |
|
Application submitted |
We’ve received your application |
As soon as you’ve submitted your application |
|
Email HR Manager |
We’ve assigned your application to one of the team and they have
triggered an email to your HR Manager |
Within 3 working days of receiving your application but this depends
on the volume of applications we have received* |
|
Pending – missing information |
This can be for several reasons: ·
We haven’t heard from your HR Manager so we’ve
emailed them again ·
Please check that any emails we’ve sent you have not
gone into your spam folder ·
An application does not have all the required
documents |
Within 5 working days of receiving your application but this depends
on the volume of applications we’ve received*. We will email you within 5 working days for the missing documentation but
this depends on the volume of applications we’ve received*. |
|
Eligible |
One of the team has worked through your application and thinks this is
eligible. You will be emailed confirming you are eligible and you will be asked
to fill out a short questionnaire |
Within 3 working days of receiving all the required information but it
may take longer depending on how many applications we are processing* |
|
Approved |
We have received the submitted questionnaire and your contact details
have been sent to Red Umbrella who will contact you to arrange your sessions. |
Within 2 working days of being marked as eligible.* Please note that
it may take up to five working days for Red Umbrella to contact you* |
|
Declined |
If you do not meet the criteria for funding |
Within 10 days of receiving your application* We will email you to let you know. |
|
Closed |
If we haven’t heard back from you or the HR Manager, then we can’t
continue to process your application and we will close it. |
Within 10 to 14 days of receiving your application – but this may be
longer depending on circumstances |
If a previous application to us was declined, you can apply again. But please consider why you were declined and check our eligibility criteria before applying again.
Yes, if you have received a financial grant from us previously you can apply to the mental health support fund
Once you’ve submitted your application you’ll receive an automated response which will include a link to your application and a reference number which begins with GA 0000 followed by 4 numbers. Keep this safe – you can use it to check on the progress of your application online on our Grants Tracker and it’s the best way to see progress on your application.
We kindly ask that you do not keep emailing us to check on the progress of your application – it takes time to respond to emails; we have to search online for your application and then read the notes the assessor has written, before we can reply to you. The best way to check on progress is to use the grants tracker.
It can take up to two working weeks to assess and process an application if all the relevant documentation has been submitted. If the documentation has not been provided on submission or we need to chase your HR representative, it will inevitably take longer.
The Care Workers’ Charity will notify applicants via email regarding the outcome of their grant application.
This is very unlikely to happen. Check your junk mail as some of our emails to you may end up in there and we may be responding to your query or waiting for a response from you.
Red Umbrella will contact you to arrange your sessions. Once your details have been sent to Red Umbrella you will communicate with them directly going forward with your sessions going forward. You and Red Umbrella will arrange the best times for your sessions and they will accommodate your schedule.
Please give us some feedback! Good or not so good, we can learn from your feedback and when it’s good it’s lovely for us to share it with the team. When it’s not so good we can learn from it and improve our processes. We always want to do our best for you but we can’t do that if we don’t hear from you. Please note we will be sending a short feedback questionnaire for you to fill in before you finish your final session.
We’d love to hear your stories. We would love to do a short video interview with you, or a phone interview and if you’d prefer to be anonymous, we could work with you on writing your story and using stock photographs if you prefer. Please get in touch by emailing info@thecwc.org.uk
Questions for care work employers
What do I need to do as HR professional who has been contacted by you?
Once we have received an application from a care worker we automatically trigger an email to the person they have named as their HR Manager. We do this as we need to validate information before we can process an application which will hopefully result in the care worker being paid directly.
Applicants have ticked a box to say they authorize us to contact their HR Manager for information; if you are still unsure, please talk directly to the member of staff who has made the application as we are unable to disclose any details.
We ask for specific information from you:
| What we need to know | Things to note | Why we need this information |
| Your establishment/ organisation’s Companies House Registration number | This is different to your CQC location i.d. and you may need to refer to someone else in your organisation to get this information for us | This so that we can verify that your organisation is a care provider
|
| Whether the applicant is currently employed with your company and, if so, how many hours they’re contracted to work per week | This helps us work out how much funding we may be able to award them
|
|
| We ask if you’re aware of the Infection Control Fund (if you’re in England) or the Coronavirus Social Care Staff Support Fund (In Scotland) | ENGLAND: The Infection Control Fund (ICF) information
SCOTLAND: Coronovirus Social Care Staff Support Fund information |
We need to collect this data so we can identify which local authorities are using this funding to support staff
|
| We ask if you’re using the above or any other funding to support staff who are isolating in order to check whether the applicant meets our criteria | If they are on full pay or furloughed then they won’t be eligible for our funding
|
|
| We ask if the applicant has had to isolate due to Covid-19 and if so, for you to provide the dates of their absence
|
If they’ve had more than one period of isolation, please include dates of all absences | This information is key to validating what the applicant has told us and helps us determine if they meet the criteria |
- Please respond to our request within 3 working days; we know you’re very busy, but many of our applicants are desperate so the quicker we hear from you the faster we can process their application
- Please respond if we ask you to send us the required information from the organisation’s email address – we can’t verify information which is sent from a personal email address such as gmail or similar.
- Please do not leave any questions blank – we’ve kept the information required as short as possible and will need to contact you if you’ve not answered all the questions
Thank you for your help!