Guardian Charity Awards open

Any charity registered in the UK with an annual income of between £5,000 and £1m and whose objective is improving social wellbeing in its broadest sense can enter.

The awards are £6,000 from NatWest and The Royal Bank of Scotland, and a brand new PC from smartchange, for each of the five winners.

Judges include Naomi Eisenstadt, director of Sure Start, and Baroness Valerie Howarth. They hope to give the five winners a leg-up in their efforts to tackle present day problems with £6,000 of prize money and a new PC, provided by smartchange.org.

Last year's winners also included a support group for asylum seekers and others detained at Gatwick airport, a self-help organisation for victims of disasters, and a support service for families under stress.

For Norfolk and Norwich Families House, the money has allowed it to expand existing contact services for parents who no longer live with their children. June Thoburn, a charity trustee, says:

It has also been able to increase the numbers of volunteers, known as Family Friends, who can support families more intensively:

"Now they are able to go along to child protection conferences with parents and we are able to run more groups for parents who've moved on from needing one to one help," says Thoburn.

Lysa Gehrels, assistant coordinator of the Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group, says its award has similarly allowed the organisation to "offer a much better service".

She explains how the group has spent half the prize money increasing the amount of cash it gives to destitute asylum seekers who are being returned to their country of origin. "Just £20 can make a real difference to people," says Gehrels. "Often they arrive at the airport but do not have any money to return to their home which may be hundreds of miles away. And some people say they need the money to bribe their way out of the airport and to safety."

The remaining funds will pay to design a publication about the group's work. At a time when the group is reporting a rise in stress levels among its asylum seekers - partly as a result of the way in which politicians are talking about them, partly because they are now mostly unable to get a second legal opinion on their case before they are deported - Gehrels says it is imperative to "reach out to more people, tell them what we are doing".

Disaster Action is empowering people directly affected by disasters to regain as much control as they can over the difficult processes they will encounter in the aftermath, through the publication of a series of practical leaflets on its website covering sensitive issues such as the identification of bodies and securing the return of personal property.

Chair of the self-help organisation Maurice de Rohan says: "The police and frontline disaster organisations will also be able to use the leaflets to put survivors and the bereaved in touch with us."

De Rohan, whose daughter and son-in-law drowned on the Herald of Free Enterprise adds: "The Guardian award meant a lot to us. We are a small charity and this has really helped to raise our profile."

http://society.guardian.co.uk/voluntarysectorawards/

Closes 9 September 2005.