About Us
Organization :
Dundee Citizens Advice Bureau is a Scottish registered charity with a local board of directors.
We are funded by Dundee City Council (55 %), the Big Lottery Fund, the Scottish Executive. This allows us to employ a number of paid staff but over 80% of our advisers are volunteers.
We are members of Citizens Advice Scotland – an umbrella organisation that supports us in training, information and audits quality of advice given.
Aims & Principles :
Our aims are twofold, namely:
- To ensure that individuals do not suffer through lack of knowledge of their rights and
responsibilities or of the services available; or through an inability to express their
needs effectively, and - To exercise a responsible influence on the development of social policies and services,
both locally and nationally.
To achieve these aims we work to the following principles:
Free | we offer a completely free service to all our clients | |
Confidential | clients’ details are not disclosed to anyone. | |
Impartial | workers don’t make judgements about clients. | |
Independent | no outside agency influences the service offered including funders. | |
Accessible | we aim to make the service available to all. | |
Effective | we aim to meet the clients’ needs. | |
Accountable | open and democratic, responsible to the local community. | |
Client’s right to decide | we offer advice, the client makes the decision. | |
Voluntary | the service is mainly provided by unpaid staff from the community. | |
Empowerment | to help clients help themselves. | |
Information retrieval | using client experience to influence change. | |
Generalist | advice on any subject. |
What We Do :
Listen fully to all our clients. Give general advice and up to date information, explain clients’ rights, fill in forms, calculate benefit entitlement, explore the clients’ options and negotiate on their behalf if necessary. If we are not fully able to help we can often refer the client to a more suitable agency.
We offer specialist advice about debt,benefit and employment tribunals, housing and social policy work, that is using clients’ experiences to bring about changes to legislation or policy that is unfair or having an effect that was not the intention of legislators or policy-makers.
Previous page: News
Next page: Benefit Appeals