Our Mission
At the core of Iceni is a mission to make a positive difference to families in Ipswich and Suffolk who are facing challenges related to addiction and abuse.
90% of Iceni clients live in Ipswich and the surrounding areas.
Helping children have a healthy and happy start to life
Iceni exists to offer care and support to families in Ipswich and the surrounding area who are affected by addiction, and to provide such families with the help they need to improve opportunities for children in fulfilling their potential.
It aims to reduce the number of children being taken into care and to promote awareness within the local community and beyond to highlight these issues.
Our values
- We believe that all sections of the community have the right to a dedicated and professional service.
- We believe Iceni exists to meet the proven need for an independent, confidential and professional family service.
- We believe our services should be free at point of delivery for anyone requiring such services.
- We will remain steadfast in our humanistic and holistic approach to addressing familiar issues and will not compromise these approaches.
- We will work with all relevant external stakeholders who share similar aims.
- We are committed to providing funders and partner organisations with accurate information and data that ensures continuity of appropriate funding.
- We are committed to involving service users in all aspects of our work and any future developments.
- We believe that clients have the right and ability to make their own choices.
- We accept that our clients are people, not problems or statistics.
- We are determined to promote equality and equality of opportunity through every aspect of our activities.
To ensure these values are instilled into all aspects of our work, we include them in employment contracts and the staff appraisal process. We will also explain these values to commissioners, other fundraising organisations, clients and the community as a whole.
Methodology & Approach
Our approach to working with families is ‘parent-centred interventions with child-centred outcomes’. We believe that before we can have a positive impact on children, we must first begin to understand and meet the needs of the parents.
Evidence clearly demonstrates that for every family suffering from addiction and dependency, and especially those experiencing child protection proceedings, there is often a wide range of underpinning issues including neglect abuse and other difficult circumstances from the past.
These issues will often provide the root cause of current circumstances and may have resulted in the breakdown of family relationships, parental neglect and domestic abuse, which run alongside the practical implications of addiction such as poverty, homelessness and poor health or mental health.
We believe that by providing a wide range of therapeutic inputs, we are best placed to meet the varying needs of clients and offer interventions that can meet both the unmet psychological and practical needs of the client.
Find out moreBeneficiaries
The majority (90%) of our clients live in Ipswich and the surrounding areas. Our service is available to any family within Suffolk, and we are actively exploring ways of becoming more accessible to those who live in rural areas of the county.
Our primary focus is on supporting those families who face multiple disadvantage and who are most vulnerable, yet traditionally have not engaged with services. We offer anyone who requires assistance the opportunity to tackle the problems they face and give them the support, stability and encouragement in order to get their lives back on track.
The main beneficiaries are families comprising of any of the following:
- Teenage and single parents
- Women/men fleeing domestic violence
- Sex workers
- Parents experiencing mental health problems
- Those who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless
- Ex-offenders
- Children with poor physical health and poor social prospects.
Working with 300+ families every year our service is fully accessible and includes:
- Families/parents with addiction issues whose children are within the social care system.
- Families/parents with addiction issues whose children are on the ‘at risk‘ or ‘in need‘ register.
- Families where early intervention can prevent problems from escalating and requiring statutory involvement.
- People who have been victims of domestic abuse
