Gateway Family Services
Changing Lives, Changing Services.
We work to improve health, develop skills and opportunities and fight inequalities. We change the way public services work.
My husband had the baby blues.
I was talking to Debbie the other day and she told me about her husband’s baby blues. After the baby was born her husband found it difficult to adjust to the new member of the family. Debbie’s husband was used to having a tidy home and having a baby meant that Debbie’s time was spent with the baby.
Most couples face this when they have a new baby but for this couple it was even more difficult. When things got really difficult she called Theresa her Pregnancy Outreach Worker because she knew that she would understand.
Debbie contacted Theresa her POW to ask her what she should do. They didn’t know where to turn to or how to cope. They needed some support with the new baby.
Social support in pregnancy
Kalvinder talks about the support she got from Gateway.
Being pregnant is supposed to be a happy time, but it can be very difficult. We help mums deal with practical and emotional problems so they can concentrate on keeping healthy – and having healthy babies. After she found she was pregnant Kalvinder came to Birmingham from Southampton to be near her family, but there were problems. We helped her sort out a complicated benefit situation, helped her find somewhere suitable to live - and every problem solved meant there was something less for Kalvinder to worry about – and that’s what our job is all about.
Our Keyworkers get people into the jobs they want
13 weeks pregnant and under a lot of stress, Diane* was a client of our POW service. She was involved with an abusive partner and had suffered an early miscarriage, as well as experiencing the onset of depression. During that time her benefits had also been cancelled.
Diane was referred to the key worker service where she was offered support and guidance from one of Gateway’s Key-workers, Susan Bernard. When Susan met her she was still struggling financially. Susan supported Diane through frequent one to one visits and phone calls and signposted her to relevant agencies, who helped Diane get motivated and search for courses as she was interested in voluntary/paid employment. Diane’s burning ambition since leaving school has been to work in the Travel and Tourism Industry.
Diane was very resilient despite all that she had been through as a young person and had been doing voluntary work with West Midlands Fire Service for a time. She had also managed to find a voluntary placement with Travel Lodge which she has hoped would lead to a permanent position.
She enrolled for a French language class which she has been attending one evening a week to improve her skills but unfortunately had a setback due to a car accident which meant she wasn`t able to continue her role with Travel Lodge. This was really disappointing for her because she had set her heart on working for them as a Receptionist/Front of House role and had done all the required training for the organisation .This was just another barrier to overcome for Diane.
Susan supported her to complete a quality CV and covering letter so she was prepared for future job vacancies.
With the gained confidence and tools for finding employment Diane applied for a job with Birmingham Airport for a Security post. She was not expecting to receive a positive response due to lack of experience but was keen to apply and hope for the best. Diane was then short listed for the interview which was a full days assessment. Diane was very nervous but Susan supported her with interview preparation and confidence building to help Diane focus on the task ahead.
Diane’s application was successful out of sixty applicants and feels over joyed with what she has managed to achieve after such a difficult start
Diane has now started her new job and is finally getting to where she wants to be in life, all with her new baby!
*Name changed to protect identity
Losing 5 stone? That’ll be the Health Trainers
Health Trainer Paul Clarke’s client, Jenny*, was referred into the Health Trainer Service as she wanted to lose a bit of weight and also was very keen on learning more about healthy eating.
Sitting down and discussing her lifestyle, Jenny was easily able to identify the reasons behind her problems in losing weight. She also explained that she had managed to quit smoking with the help of Call to Quit, and identified that the constant support and weekly monitoring really assisted in her achievement her goal of quitting. Jenny said that she was able to give up smoking because of all the support she had.
Jenny and Paul decided that weekly monitoring would really help with weight loss. Paul explained to Jenny about the Lighten Up programme which would help her to receive the support she required with losing weight.
Paul encouraged her to attend a trial session at Weight Watchers to make sure she enjoyed the programme. Paul and Jenny were both happy with the programme and indeed Jenny had lost 4lbs in the first session!
Following on from this, Jenny had lost a further 9lbs, taking her weight loss to 13lbs. Although she was happy that she was losing weight and had almost lost a stone to this point, and had set herself a target of losing a total of 55lbs – with the support of Paul and Lighten Up
Over the next 10 weeks Jenny lost 40lbs – Which was AMAZING!! Her BMI had also decreased in this time from 31 to 24
Although the progress Jenny made was excellent, she was still determined to lose the final 6lbs to reach her target weightloss of 60lbs. Within 3 weeks of her final appointment she contacted Paul to confirm the good news that she had lost the final 6lbs she had hoped for.
In total, Jenny lost 68lbs, or an equivalent of 4 stone and 12 pounds and has vowed to keep strict on her lifestyle choices and is enjoying the time being able to be more active with her daughter.
A great example of working together, well done, Jenny Paul and the Lighten Up team.
*names changed to protect identity
POWs get more mums to breast feed
19 year old Jess talking about why she wants to breast feed.
Our latest statistics show that 70% of our mums started breast feeding, compared to 68% across Birmingham.
Most people agree that breast feeding is the best start for any baby. They got all the nutrients they need, it helps give them a strong immune system. It’s so important that UNICEF’s ‘Baby Friendly’ initiative is promoting it around the world. And we always encourage our new mums to breastfeed. Some of them say they don’t want to, but we find that’s because they don’t know how good it is for their babies and how good it is for them.
Some mums simply aren’t confident about trying it, they say they won’t do it right, and sometimes they do find it a bit difficult, and don’t have enough support to get it established.
We visit mums before they give birth to let them know what to expect, and then once the baby’s arrived we visit them at home to answer any questions and help them with any problems. We always encourage mums to give it a go and then support them so they keep going.
Starting up a charity – with help from Gateway
19 year old Francis from Northfield in Birmingham has founded his own charity with the help of Susan Bernard from Gateway Family Services.
One in five young people is now without a job. So it’s tough to find work or even work-experience. It’s especially tough to find work you really want to do, but with the help of Gateway Family Services one young man is beginning to make a dream come true – a dream he didn’t even know he had. Six months ago he didn’t have a job – now he’s started his own charity.
Last summer Francis left University without knowing what to do next. He was struggling to find full time work and couldn’t see much hope for the future.
He heard about one of our ‘Back to Work’ events, he wasn’t sure it was for him, but went along anyway and met Susan Bernard. Susan is a Gateway Family Services Key Worker, funded by the Big Lottery. Her role is to advise and support people to get the skills they need to find work – and that’s what she did for Francis.
He’d got some ideas about voluntary work with young people and children; he loved football, and he’d heard about a charity in the Cameroon that was helping young people through the sport. He wanted to get involved, he wanted to help. Then he had an idea of setting up his own charity to work with the one in Cameroon – but didn’t know where to start.
But Susan did. With her local knowledge and contacts, Francis found the right people to talk to; he got the right experience and the right help. From first aid qualifications to business advice. So, with Susan’s encouragement and support he set up his own charity. Based on the principles of ‘Football4Action’ it’s called ‘Rural Development Centre UK’ or RUDEC UK, and it aims to equip young people in Cameroon with the skills to make a difference to their local community and a difference to their own future.
Francis has found more support, from two other charities – Edward’s Trust and Acorns, and from Waitrose in Harborne – and Susan is still supporting him too. In June he will be making his first trip to Cameroon to see at first hand the challenge for his charity.
So – in a few short months, a young man who didn’t know what to do has found the direction he wants to take with the help of Susan and Gateway Family Services.
Hitting the targets – missing the point
Once again this week I will be spending my time responding to service specifications through a procurement portal. It’s good that there are still tenders to respond to, but….
What I write in response to their questions doesn’t give me the opportunity to talk about the really important stuff, the life-changing opportunities and the amazing journey that some people will make.
Every day I hear remarkable stories from staff about the achievements of the people they work with, the overwhelming barriers they face and the challenges they have overcome.
And every month I read the reports to the commissioners about the targets they set us and how we have achieved them. As I read these reports I see nothing about individual’s triumphs, –largely because this information is not measured as a target.
Yet when I do tell people about the difficult circumstances that some of our clients are in, and how we have helped them everyone agrees it’s the right thing to do, it’s needed and often changes lives – will these experiences ever change services?
We know loads of stuff
The term commissioning comes from shipbuilding, and it feels to me that often we are treated as an empty vessel. The reality is that we are packed to the rafters with experience, knowledge, skills and understanding from all sorts of perspectives – community based organisations usually are.
Trust is a great thing
The thing that makes us able to help people, is because we can listen to them, often we have been where they are, sometime live in the same places and most importantly we can see many perspectives, we are here because of our life experience. Someone recently said to me “The best guides in life are those that are just a few steps ahead of you” – that is how we see ourselves in relation to our clients. We need to be trusted to work in ways we know best.
We will find the way – see you there.
Where it starts to become uneasy is when the path is set, the route is determined and the road to a target is specified. In our sector, there is a well known route – it’s called the Patient Pathway and many many hours have been spent designing it, mostly by people who are never going to walk down it.
People can do even greater things
About 95% of the time spent by people working in communities is on negotiating the hoops that have been set down, in order to get to a target.
Negotiating services and systems is a job in itself; how to find what you want, where you want it and how you want it would be much easier if the road to the target was simple, the signs were clear and perhaps designed by those who use it.
Community/voluntary organisations, social enterprises, Community Interest Companies know loads of things, we don’t want to be responders, we need to be specifiers – then maybe targets will become more relevant to the point.
Skills in Birmingham
There has been an interesting conversation this week about what it is that employers value when recruiting staff With the Birmingham and Solihull LEP meeting at the end of the month to discuss what skills the people of Birmingham need, Nick Booth from Podnosh, has tried to gather the views of people from across the city to see what they feel is currently missing in his blog piece below;
Views are sought from local organisations from across different sectors, each describing their interactions with the percieved skills (or lack of them) in the local area and also commenting on what they think is needed to make sure that Birmingham, and it’s people, is ready for the future.
Karl Binder, from Adhere left his views on the site, amongst others, while Gateway’s Chief Executive, Vicki Fitzgerald also commented on the debate by saying, “As a training provider and accredited delivery agent for qualifications, people often think we value qualifications above all else. This isn’t true, in fact the opposite is the case. We employ over 60 people that we have recruited for their experience, mostly of life, family, barriers, prejudice and often overcoming the most difficult of circumstances. Their experience is nothing without genuine commitment, passion and enthusiasm for what they are doing and it’s these values that we would recruit for.
Often qualifications mean exclusion for many rather than inclusion.I often see them as a hoop people have to jump through in order to do things that really matter. For me, while others were doing their degrees or their masters, I was learning about real life and real people and it taught me a huge amount.
We work mostly with the NHS and professional qualifications are necessary in most cases (my dentist for example!) Unlike many other sectors the qualifications rarely change and this can mean a job for life, but it also can mean that you never get to employ people who see the world from different perspectives – always valuing skills and qualifications over experience and values makes for a very insular organisation
So what do you think?
Are the skills that people are learning useful in today’s world? What skills, and when, should we be looking for when employing staff and does experience and ‘life-skills’ make you stand out more than qualifications?
Gateway Wins Award for Reducing Barriers to Employment
From left to right: (Gateway Programme Manager, Laura Ward, Sue Gladwish and Kerry Chase from Action for Blind People)
Gateway Family Services were delighted to receive an award this week from Action for Blind People, the charity that represents those who are blind and partially sighted, across the UK.
Gateway, who are a social enterprise that helps overcome barriers to employment and community health services, received the charity’s ‘See the Capability, not the Disability’ award for their work with Sue Gladwish, a registered blind lady from Kitwell in Birmingham who, after a six-month paid placement, has now been offered employment, helping to transform her confidence and self-belief. In the video below, Sue talks to us about how, after 18 years, she is enjoying being back in the ‘working groove’ again.
Sue is the administrator for Gateway’s Lighten Up Service. She said: “Gateway Family Services has recognised my capability, not the disability of sight loss. Their support has boosted my self-esteem, showing that being visually impaired shouldn’t be a barrier to work. I can contribute just as much as my sighted colleagues, thanks to the company’s innovation and support.”
Getting Healthy and Losing Weight for the New Year
In November 2011, Susie* was referred to the Health Trainer Service through her GP surgery.
Like many, Susie was keen to lose weight, but with the festive season looming around the corner, she thought it would be a challenge to commit to any goals. Traditionally Christmas & the New Year would bring more sugary indulgences and larger portion sizes, not to mention the excess of wine.
Susie was allocated Keiran McKenzie as her Health Trainer. During the initial assessment on the 13th December, Susie told Keiran how she had previously struggled to lose weight and how her weight had increased over the last 2 years. She had tried cutting out chocolate, and even tried cutting out snacks after 8pm; all to no avail.
Keiran was able to listen to her problems and offer alternative advice on healthy ways to lose weight and improve her life. Susie embraced the advice given, and after setting herself some realistic goals, she was ready and determined to face Christmas.
Having enjoyed her Christmas season, whilst keeping to her goals, Susie returned in the New Year, unsure of what the outcome would be. To her delight, she had lost 3.2lbs, and is now even more eager to stick to her goals. This goes to show how healthy eating can in fact be just as enjoyable, whilst helping you lose a few pounds if executed correctly.
Well done to Susie and Keiran!!
* name changed to protect identity