Money Advice Referral Tool (MART)
Resolve Poverty believes that responses to poverty should focus on getting more money into people’s pockets. That’s why one of our strategic priorities is to support local efforts to boost household income and financial resilience.
For many frontline organisations helping people dealing with poverty, information on where to refer people for appropriate support and advice is not always easy to find. The Money Advice Referral Tools (MARTs) aim to help these organisations and professionals by simplifying the process and putting the key information at their fingertips.
The MARTs do this by guiding you through a conversation with a person about their financial difficulties so that you can confidently:
- refer them onto an organisation which can help them maximise their income, and/or
- refer them to an organisation that can provide advice/help on issues that may have caused their financial difficulties, or made those difficulties worse (such as their mental health)
Money Advice Referral Tools have now been developed for seven boroughs and you can download the latest version of these below. The MARTs have been created via local working groups, typically involving local authorities, housing associations, foodbanks, other voluntary groups and people with lived experience of poverty.
Using the MART
Before you use the MART
The MART is simple to navigate but before you use it we recommend that you view the short introduction, which you can access below.
Monitoring use of the MARTs
Please use this form to help us collect data about how the MARTs are used, what support people are accessing, and what support people need but cannot access.
Feedback
If you are using one of our referral tools, we would appreciate your feedback about how you are finding it. This will help us to learn, and to improve the MARTs.
We can work with you to develop a local Money Advice Referral Tool
Our offer includes:
- Establishing and facilitating a MART working group in your area, bringing together partners and people with lived experience of poverty
- Using our learning and experience to-date to develop a MART and testing this with relevant stakeholders
- Distributing the MART and providing training for users
- Monitoring usage and impact of the MART to assist with evaluation
- Updating the MART in line with evaluation findings and working group input
- Maintaining the MART’s content to ensure it remains up to date.
Contact Daniel Oliver at daniel@resolvepoverty.org to find out more.
This programme was developed with The Trussell Trust, with additional support from stakeholders in localities.
The programme is currently being funded by the Greater Manchester Combined Authority.
Thank you also to the Menu for Change project on which the MARTs are based.