If you have felt the call to serve your local community by setting up a Debt Advice Centre then we can help!

Community Money Advice has produced a booklet setting out the basic legal and practical steps in setting up a new Centre. This covers topics such as training, registering with the Office of Fair Trading, obtaining insurance and many more topics. The booklet costs £3 and is available from our Resources page.

At each stage of the process CMA will be there to help you through. A typical example of the process might look a bit like this:

• Individual or group contacts CMA expressing an interest in setting up a Debt Advice Centre
• CMA provides 'Setting Up' booklet to the interested party.
• After reading the 'Setting Up' booklet, the interested party confirms they wish to proceed.
• CMA assigns the interested party a local 'mentor' who can introduce them to existing CMA member centres in the region and provide help and support during the process of setting up a Centre.
• Potential centre joins Community Money Advice
• Potential centre recruits volunteers or staff and sends them on the CMA Part 1 and Part 2 training days.
• Potential centre also arranges OFT registration, insurance, offices and other administrative functions with support from CMA.
• New centre opens doors to the public!

Obviously this is a considerably simplified example, but should serve to show the basic process. Our 'Setting Up' booklet breaks the process down into 17 steps and provides far more detail on each step than we can fit onto this website.

If you would like to speak to someone about any part of this process then just click here to contact us. To order a copy of the 'Setting Up' booklet, please click here.