About us

Sometimes we all need some help to find and access the activities or services that will improve our lives. Glasgow Helps is a partnership of the city's public and voluntary sectors, created to make it easier to find what you need when you need it.

This web directory is part of the Glasgow Helps work, aiming to help citizens, and the people who support them, find services more easily.

Glasgow Helps is also about transforming how services reach the people who need help and how services work with each other more effectively.

What will I find here?

You’ll find everything from social clubs and activities right through to mental health support. Maybe you need financial advice or help to manage a health condition? You’ll find it all here so dive in and take a look, you might be surprised at what’s on your doorstep.

Who is providing these services?

You might call them charities, community or voluntary organisations. Those terms all mean similar things but, together, they’re usually called the ‘third sector’.

Some of them are small and operated by volunteers and some are funded by the local council or healthcare partnership to deliver important services in their communities. Some are based in one particular area and some are national organisations providing services all over Scotland and the UK.

No matter the size and scope of the organisation, they all have something great to offer.

There is so much happening in Glasgow, with voluntary organisations and charities busier than ever, but sometimes folk struggle to find the help that they are looking for. We hope that Glasgow Helps will go some way to bridging this gap and assist people with finding what they need.

Ian Bruce, Chief Executive, Glasgow Council for the Voluntary Sector

Are these services free?

A lot of them are, but not all. Third sector organisations may charge for some services to help cover costs but they’ll usually always try to keep prices affordable compared to private companies. We don’t list services from private companies on this site as they’re already easy for people to find.

A service I contacted no longer exists

There’s so much going on in Glasgow and it’s a huge job to keep it all up to date. We try our best to keep on top of things but sometimes services change before we can update them.

If you come across anything that no longer exists, please let us know and we’ll investigate. All listings have a link at the bottom to let us know if anything needs to be updated.

The site looks different

Yes it does! The original Glasgow Helps site was launched at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic to help connect people to new services that could support them during lockdown. It did a fantastic job but there wasn't much time to plan and we always knew there was so much more it could achieve. We've taken some time over the last year to work with our partners and users to explore what people really need from a site like this and the result is what you see now.

Almost everything is different on the new site. With more time to plan, we've re-built the site from the ground up using a lot of feedback from people across the city to guide us. You can now search for services by postcode and distance rather than being limited to pre-set 'neighbourhoods'. Services have simpler categories and tags which were designed by users themselves to make finding support much easier and our search pages now contain much clearer information to help give you an idea of what services offer and who they're for.

There's so much to discover and the best way to see the difference is to explore for yourself.

Not yet. We have a lot of information on services across Glasgow but some of it was out of date and related to things happening during the pandemic. We want to make sure all of the information on the new site is good quality and relevant to what people need now. We'll be working hard to add more listings to the site so please bookmark us and come back regularly to see what's new.

On the old site, organisations could log-in to manage their listings but that isn't available at the moment. As part of our ongoing development, we're looking at a whole new approach to user accounts. We want organisations to be able to manage their listings as they could before, but we also plan to include features where users can save their favorite services and even create their own mini directories that they can share with others. We hope to continue work over the course of the year to add these new features.

Get in touch

The Glasgow Helps web directory is delivered by Glasgow Council for the Voluntary Sector (GCVS) in partnership with Glasgow City Council (“the Council”) and is available to all citizens and organisations across the city.

The Council also operates the Glasgow Helps telephone based service which offers confidential support, information and advice to citizens on a wide range of issues (link to service listing).

Both parties aim to ensure that the information that we provide is accurate, including:

  • information on this website;
  • links to other organisations’ websites and their content;
  • information that may be provided directly by our staff.

Where information is provided through an external organisation:

  • we cannot accept responsibility for errors or omissions;
  • we do not necessarily endorse views or opinions expressed within these sites; and
  • we cannot guarantee that any external links will work all of the time.

Neither party is responsible for the availability of, or the content located on or through, any external site. While every effort and care is taken in preparing the content of this site, GCVS and the Council disclaim all warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy of the information in any of the content. They also (to the extent permitted by law) shall not be liable for any losses, damages or inconvenience arising from the use of, or reliance on, the information on our website, any sites linked to this website or as a result of contacting the Glasgow Helps telephone service directly.