The Application Process

A key element of the Acts 435 process is that an individual applicant is known to the partner organisation in some way, or to a professional with whom you have a working relationship.

There are many ways that applicants can be identified:

For churches:

• Many applicants may already be known to your church, or can be identified by the church leaders or pastoral workers.

• Known by individual church members – the Applicant may not necessarily be a church member or church goer, but could be referred by a contact within your congregation who you do know well.

• Referred to the church by an organisation who can vouch for the individual and their need, eg. Family Support worker, local Headteacher etc.

In charity settings, it is usual that applicants will be existing clients or service users.

If/ when an individual is completely unknown to your organisation, but you are willing and able to help, we want to enable you to help them. In such circumstances we would expect there to be more checks and balances in place in terms of ID and an understanding of the validity of their need (further details and advice on this can be found in Appendix 2).

• The Applicant should ideally live/work within your local church’s wider community, or be within the client base of your charity.

• People beyond these parameters should be referred to their most local Acts 435 partner, but where there is no partner in that locality you could post a request for them if you are willing and able.

The Advocate, with the Applicant, completes a simple Application Form- this is available on the Partner Dashboard online, and can be printed to fill out on paper or can be completed directly onto the Dashboard.

The Applicant will need to provide some basic, key information– name, date of birth and a brief description of their need and circumstances.

• The summary of their need and their circumstances will form the basis of the ‘request’ that will be posted on the Acts 435 website and should be written in such a way as to enable potential donors to connect and empathise with the Applicant.

• The information published on the public website does not include any confidential information, only the Applicant’s age, city of residence and the nature of the request and amount, but the forms should be retained locally as part of the Acts 435 Monitoring and Audit Trail. There should be no reference made to any names within the description of the request, instead we would ask Advocates to use just initials or generic terms (e.g “this lady”, “this gentleman”, “our client”) to refer to the Applicant.

• Every effort should be made to store any hard copies of forms safely to ensure compliance with Data Protection legislation.

• Many of the people you help will be people you may have already been working with for some time so you will have already confirmed their identification earlier on in the relationship.

• For members of your congregation who you know well, we would not expect Advocates to ask to see proof of ID before posting an Acts 435 request.

• For people referred in from another organisation, such as a school, the expectation is that you will take on trust that the person in need is well known to the referrer.

• Where the person is not well known to the church or charity, you should ask for ID to confirm their identity. Recognising that not everyone has photo ID, this can be a utility bill or similar.

• Where a person in need does not have any ID, we would recommend that a note is made of this but that the person is not excluded from receiving help where you believe the reason for them not having ID is genuine.