Schemes and Support
We are always looking for new ways to provide support and help to our community. We welcome any suggestions.
Taxi Card
In rural Powys, travel difficulties can be a major cause of hardship to many residents. Our Taxi Card scheme helps people to live independent lives in our community by providing members with £50 of tokens helping towards payment of taxi fares. Two local taxi firms accept these tokens: Woods Taxis and Dowses Taxis. Seventy four members were registered on this scheme in 2005/2006. We gave a double issue of tokens to twenty eight members living outside Builth. A popular and highly valued scheme.
Voluntary Transport
Demand for this transport scheme increases each year, showing the importance of this scheme in our rural area, where public transport is not ready available or accessible. This scheme provides transport for essential journeys. Our volunteers use their own cars and are paid mileage expenses, passengers make a contribution to towards the cost of the journey and the balance of volunteer expenses is funded from grants and donations. As transport provided by the Health Board is not usually available, the majority of our journeys are to health care facilities; hospitals, doctors, dentists, etc. Our volunteer drivers will undertake journeys, local and further afield.
Befriending
Befriending covers a multitude of services, such as dog walking, collecting prescriptions, some requests are in response to a particular need – where someone needs assistance until they recover from an illness or bereavement. Some are long term where support with everyday tasks is required. If you think you can help in anyway then please get in touch with us here at Community Support.
Library Service
This service is run in partnership with Builth Library and covers Builth town (this area is not covered by the mobile library service). It is operated every four weeks, on a Tuesday morning. Two volunteers using their own car take a selection of books for people to choose from, or if they are able to get to the library but cannot manage to carry the books home we will deliver them to their home. We currently visit four individuals and two residential homes. It is very much appreciated by those who receive it. It is hoped that this service will expand as current library user’s age and find the need to have their books delivered.
Meal Delivery
On behalf of Social Care Services we continue to organise the delivery of meals in Builth Wells town. Our volunteers drive themselves on the round and currently deliver seven meals every Thursday. We also provide a volunteer driver on Wednesdays for the Beulah/Llanwrtyd round. If you can help or are in need of Meals on Wheels yourself then please contact us.
Signposting
Due to our central position, we have numerous callers requesting information on other organisations, service providers and statutory bodies. We have a large selection of leaflets and contact details available for these. For example CAB, Benefits Agency, Pension Service. Please check out our resources page on this site for some useful pointers to various organisations used by Community Support.
Office Support
We usually have a volunteer helping in the office during our public opening hours as we have a steady stream of callers to the office, requests for our services, enquiries about volunteering, volunteers for their tasks etc. It is very varied and the volunteers who provide office support find it interesting to see at first hand all we provide. Please check out our Get Involved page for further information.
Volunteer Support / Placement
We have twenty two organisations registered with us requiring volunteers. We advertise their vacancies in our newsletter, on our notice board and on the WCVA website. We provide support and training to volunteers.
Shop Front Displays
One of our “shop front” windows is available to other organisations for their own promotion purposes. This was used by twenty four organisations in 2005 – 2006. Builth Against Closing Hospitals (BACH) were frequent users of our "shop front" in 2006.
Charity Shop
We run a fundraising Charity Shop in Builth Wells High Street. Please come along and pay us a visit.