Citizens Advice Staffordshire North & Stoke-on-Trent is one of the country’s largest and most dynamic advice agencies with a national reputation for exciting and ground-breaking innovations. We have been at the cutting edge of most major developments in advice work during the last 40 years whether pioneering tribunal representation and debt advice in the early 1980s, or inventing casework support to the victims of race harassment in the mid-1990s, leading the field in advice services to refugees and asylum seekers and other excluded groups in the ‘noughties’ or piloting digital and developing telephone advice as we do now.

We are an independent local charity, led by a Trustee Board of local volunteers with a wide range of skills and experience. As such, we respond swiftly to emerging local needs and base our service development very firmly on the issues faced by our local communities.

As members of Citizens Advice (the National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux) we are also committed to giving accurate, free assistance to any member of the community and, having done that, we use the experience of social problems brought to us by our enquirers to responsibly influence the social policies that have caused those problems.

Because we want to be as available as possible to all members of the community, we are careful to maintain a style which is completely impartial so we do not have any underlying political or social aims or ideologies as an organisation, and we attempt to keep our personal views from compromising that impartiality.

Our mission statement requires us to empower individuals who are poor or who suffer discrimination, and to inform policy makers of how they can combat poverty and inequality. This involves us in robust use of the media (locally and nationally) and in work with other organisations and groups.  We actively participate in a wide range of local partnerships.