Oasis Families
Click here to find out about our current and EASTER HOLIDAY programme for families!
Our Vision
We know that being part of a community is essential for a child and their family to truly thrive, and to become more resilient to challenges and barriers they may face. We are all people who have physical, emotional, spiritual and social needs. Our unique integrated Hub model has community at the centre.
We don’t view individuals or families as “clients”, we work alongside people through their journey to facilitate access to partnerships and local services and organisations. We strengthen support networks and community with a view to support families in a holistic, integrated way.
This includes our local council services in Lambeth and Southwark, local GPs and agencies, The Small Project, local Community Organisations Coin Street Community Builders, BOST amongst others, as well as local arts and uniform groups, such as Waterloo Community Theatre, Brownies and Scouts.
What We Do
Our Children & Families work weaves across our Hub. It includes focused work alongside our primary and secondary schools – Oasis Academy Johanna and Oasis Academy South Bank, our farm Oasis Farm Waterloo, and our early years centre, Oasis Playspace.
Our work also includes family days, activities, events and volunteering across the year as well as a range of annual events such as our Christmas Fayre, Waterloo Carnival, and Summer at Oasis holiday provision.
The Hub provides touch points that meets local need, this includes the Waterloo Foodbank and Advice Centre offering specific support to families, the Waterloo Library service based in the Oasis Centre, as well as Oasis Farm Waterloo and the Hub Coffee House, providing a welcoming, affordable environment for families to come and spend time.
Within Oasis Church Waterloo specifically, we have vibrant children and family groups meeting during Sunday services, that nurture spiritual, emotional and intellectual growth, through creating safe spaces for fun and creative activities. Click here for more details.
Three core areas of our work include:
- Family support
We offer specific support to families facing hardship, challenge, struggling with physical or emotional health, and at risk of or experiencing acute crisis. This is tailored depending on the individual family and circumstance and involves a holistic approach of care – we will journey witha. parent or family.
- Promoting positive activity, health and wellbeing
In order to build a resilient community, we invite children and families to join us in creating positive activity that promotes wellbeing, build character, financial resilience, skills and relationships. We facilitate this through a range of after-school and weekend activities, such as baby groups, parent courses, adult learning, English classes, library use, holiday provision and community events.
- Getting and keeping families active, being healthy and strong
Our sports team, Simon Butler and Charlotte Hilton, have developed a programme of fun family sessions to encourage whole families to get active together, building confidence, trying new sports and physical activity, and being healthy and stronger together. This way, the kids have good role models, and everyone can support one another!
Staff
The work is led by Felicity Maries, who works closely with Charlotte as she leads delivery for our early years and Small Project sessions, Sonya our Family Support Worker, and Dick & Di our Community Workers. Simon heads up the Sports programme. We also have staff on our Employability Empowerment scheme, and Wafaa, Djamila, Heba and others who make up our sessional team.
Rebekah and our wider Advice team also work closely with Felicity & Sonya in the area of Family Support, with benefit, debt, housing support and immigration advice, as does Stu Thomson, our Head of Youth services, Jordan Gayle and Tom Isaac, our Youth Managers.
We take the safety and wellbeing of children seriously and ensure all workers with responsibility for children have DBS checks and receive regular appropriate training. You can view our safeguarding policy here.