About

Forces Online CIO is a registered charity - "The Relief of Former Armed Forces Service Personnel, who are in need by reason of age, disability, financial hardship or other disadvantage in particular but not exclusively by providing them with help and assistance and by offering them a sign posting service to expert support providers for their benefit".

Forces Online CIO (also known as Forces Online is a registered Charity (CIO) registered on the 7th April 2020 Reg. No. 1188955 (England and Wales). On the 21st January Forces Online Scotland was register with OSCR Reg. No. SC050678. The organisation is set up to work with veterans across the whole of the United Kingdom for:

"The Relief of Former Armed Forces Service Personnel, who are in need by reason of age, disability, financial hardship or other disadvantage in particular but not exclusively by providing them with help and assistance and by offering them a sign posting service to expert support providers for their benefit". The Registered Head Office Address is:

Unit 5, Workshed Carriage Works, London Street, Swindon, Wiltshire, SN1 5DG

A full breakdown of the Team can be found on our main contact page https://www.forcesonline.org.uk/contact-us

The following information describes the mission statement of

FORCES ONLINE CIO * To provide a professional secure website, listing all the Armed Forces Community support Organisations in the United Kingdom, and work to alongside them to promote their services to ensure there is a quality choice based system for veterans, focusing on identifying the type of service, and nearest location of the service/support system which are broken down into a unique Forces Online CIO county based structure. * To provide County based support pages in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, with each Country having a national office, and sub offices to promote local relationships via our supporters (i.e. other veterans/private organisations). * To provide a County-wide Facebook network, which will have corresponding groups, to each of the County based web pages, and to provide a network of suitable, trained volunteers, who will be willing to staff a virtual peer to peer telephone network, which could also be represented by the United Kingdom veterans county hub and club and social media network. * To provide a minimum of 1 x volunteer Senior Veterans Support Coordinator (SVSC) per County supported by a team of Volunteer Veterans Support Coordinators (VSCs), who will support and administer the local Forces Online CIO business, identifying and passing details of organisations that work to support veterans at County level back to the central team, and using their local knowledge the teams will be required to engage, and identify opportunities to directly support veterans and their families who need help with a whole range of support and issues. The Forces Online CIO referral process will be both manual by completing a pre-printed form, or an electronic version on the website. * To create and employ a direct funding and awareness team that will be headed up by a Funding director to go out into the local areas and engage with the local communities in relation to the work of Forces Online CIO and how to contact us and access our services, as well as to identify and carryout fundraising activities, working in support of local veterans organisations, to help them raise their profiles for the greater good of veterans causes, including financially. Part of this work will also include the formation of a veteran’s hardship fund called the Tom Howat Memorial Hardship Foundation which will be on hand to give direct financial and other assistance to veterans who are suffering from hardship and possible harm as a result of their immediate circumstances. * To provide a valuable contact and network sharing system for its members, through the Forces Online CIO website, social media network, the blog, mailing list, email, the virtual phone network, the county based mobile app and Chat Heroes/ Rubicon-CSR shown on every page, and directory listing. * To establish proper links within each community where Forces Online CIO is present. i.e. health, local authority, TV, news, external support, employment, welfare, community (companies who buy into helping veterans) and armed forces covenant. etc. * To help empower and support new organisations via association to Forces Online CIO and our extensive contact and network system, to form relationships with established organisations to support and engage with a country-wide cooperative contact/broadcast system for veterans issues, which will also be used by the collaborative organisations for breaking news about a whole range of issues, activities and events, etc. The aim will be to provide autonomy within the counties and to encourage participating organisations to work together. * To seek and provide funding sources for local veteran’s areas (counties) and help with raising funds for other veterans’ organisations via our own charity. * To explore the possibility of adding the emergency service support mechanism to Forces Online CIO. * To develop Forces Online charity teams by effective management, training and development covering a diverse range of skills across boundaries supporting other statically based and national organisations, within and outside of the armed forces community, recognising that there is a range of civilian based organisations that employ services that veterans are often referred to or come into contact with on a daily basis. * To set up and implement a Forces Online CIO membership system that will have both free, paid and corporate membership levels and the income being used to cover operating costs and a THMHF Top Up. * To support a vulnerable person’s phone application that could be useful to track vulnerable veterans called Trusted Wellbeing. * To manage the Virtual Hub Zoom network allowing Veteran's and their families to directly engage with our support staff, who can help them with searching for support organisations, and complete the necessary online forms, email, etc. This system can also be used by our Friendship System, and also provide training and support for our own staff team. * To manage and develop the Friendship System which is our own unique brand of our in house Welfare system. The Friendship database support tool is being developed as a multi-referral system that tracks and monitors the beneficiaries who need help from other services, as well as maintains the records between our friendship workers and the people they support. This system is unique and headed up by a qualified and experiences Therapist and a qualified Social Worker. * Any other things that will complement the good name and service of Forces Online, ensuring that Forces Online is helping veterans and their families in any way we can.

https://www.forcesonline.org.uk (official website)