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.
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
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?
Strictly Not Rehabilitation
Our new out-patient service offers cardio out-patients and their families the chance to work with a “befriender” to progress their recovery plan.
The befriender will be a first contact point for any aspects of the recovery programme and could assist with going to the shops, getting to the planned dance classes.
Part of Strictly is an invitation to attend a weekly dance class – whether to improve your dancing skills (!), meet with other patients or one of our team, or simply socialise.
The Strictly dance session will be held weekly, at Selly Oak Methodist Church in Langleys Road . At this class the patients and their partner/friend, if you choose to bring one, will be invited to get up and dance. Dances will be available that don’t need a partner. Professional instruction will be provided! If people don’t want to dance and just prefer to just sit it out that’s fine too. The idea is to have fun!
The programme is free and will last 12 weeks during which you will be asked to complete questionnaires so we can get an idea of how the programme is doing.
Here, one of our volunteers, Jim, explains why he has decided to give up some of his time to volunteer within his local community after being made redundant
Gateways skills training and apprenticeships offer employment opportunities
We work in areas where unemployment is well over 10%. There are over 1.2 million unemployed young people aged between 16 and 24 in the country as a whole and in our region there are 178,000 workless people, and 208,000 working age people with no qualifications at all. For people without qualifications or experience, finding work is more than tough. Training and employment opportunities are really important, and we work to provide them.
Some of the people who’ve tried our courses talk about their experience.
We help give local people the skills they need to find work, and whenever we can we recruit local people to work in their local area. They help others to live healthy lives, at the same time they have the chance to work. Training in skills for employment and apprenticeship schemes provide more opportunities to overcome barriers to employment.