London City Airport Community Fund awards £35k to local groups to support East London’s recovery
Green Schools Project CIC Zero Carbon Schools is a programme that engages pupils in efforts to reduce their school’s carbon emissions. This helps young people to develop valuable skills that will help them in their own lives and enable them to lead the change to a more sustainable society.
Through Zero Carbon Schools, pupils are offered the opportunity to run various projects such as monitoring and reducing energy usage, encouraging sustainable travel to school, and reducing carbon emissions from the food eaten at school. The skills pupils will develop on the programme – problem-solving, teamwork, leadership, communication – will be hugely valuable for their own futures.
ELREM FOUNDATION CIC aim is to address the feelings of exclusion and isolation through a well-managed and marketed Deaf-led instructor DeafCycling.uk pilot program, ensuring every Deaf child can participate in Bikeability Training and go onto enjoy a lifetime of safe cycling, whether alone or in groups. The program will have a trickle-down effect on the children’s parents and/or guardians too, who may not have had the opportunity to learn to cycle from an early age – and they would like to expand the program with the help of partners Bikeworks CIC, to include Adults and Seniors. They have partnered with Newham-based, Bikeworks, to introduce the DeafCycling.uk program due to their extensive experience in providing access to all through their Inclusion Program.
All East London Boroughs
Breaking Barriers Employment Programme will provide tailored, 1:1 employment advice and guidance to 80 people from a refugee background living within the local boroughs. This project aims to help refugees acquire the knowledge, confidence and experience to enter stable, fulfilling employment.
Our work also has a proven record of raising the aspirations of those that we support. Our clients routinely complete Impact Surveys which measure “soft” outcomes like our clients’ perceived confidence.
Topics covered in a 1:1 employment session include a CV and cover letter writing, job searching and interview practice. This is complemented by English and IT courses at varying levels. We partner with 20 businesses including Grant Thornton, IKEA and Mayer Brown, with whom we provide our clients with skills workshops, paid work placements and permanent job opportunities.
Barking and Dagenham
Kingsley Hall Church and Community Centre The ‘Cooking Together’ initiative: The project will engage a wide range of local people with healthy cooking, making connections, reducing food poverty and celebrating cultural diversity. Our trained chef will lead cooking sessions for up to five people, giving people better-cooking skills, understanding of healthy cooking and making connections locally. With your sponsorship we would run 15 sessions:
We are supporting 400 people, including 220 families, and currently providing 1,500 essential items each week. We believe that this project will help to build a stronger and healthier community by removing the stigma of healthy but affordable cooking, and by bringing groups of people together who are in similar situations. We hope that the cooking together sessions will spark friendships and reduce isolation - and become a conversation starter within the community. The recipe of the month and lending library are also meant to highlight the healthy eating message.
Hackney
Just Kidding is working with Special Educational Needs (SEN) children in the aftermath of COVID -19. Educational payback is hard and heavy, particularly so for SEN children's education, which stagnated and even regressed during this period. Without significant support, 80% of SEN children will not be able to graduate to the next class.
The complex social skills necessary for confident, responsive, and mutually beneficial interaction with other people are certainly among the most important skills a child must learn.
A person’s social facility has profound implications for nearly every facet of life, both in childhood and in adulthood. A lack of social skills may lead directly to problems in interpersonal relationships or may interfere indirectly with optimal functioning in school, occupational and recreational activities.
Social Station is an afterschool speech and communication club for 45 children who are exhibiting risk factors for autism, sensory issues, anxiety or communication-related disorder.
Young and Inspired advocates for over 430 children, young people and young families; inhibited by inter-generational poverty and its subsequent challenges; living in inner-city Hackney and neighbouring boroughs.
Our vision is to empower multiply disadvantaged children and young people to beat financial, social and academic barriers so that they can have a great childhood, a healthy transition into adulthood. We aim to empower them with the tools to break free from the vicious intergenerational cycle of poverty, unemployment and low aspirations. We also aim to strengthen the young family unit, which is the best way of ensuring that children`s physical, emotional and academic needs are met at a holistic and natural level.
This project is geared to give upwards of 90 young families the skills to shop, cook and eat healthy meals as a family, enable a supportive social network for teenaged and marginalised parents including, reducing waste and dependency on food and crises charity, improve physical and emotional wellbeing and strengthen the family unit at its weakest link.
Misgav’s 2 months employment and IT skills project with additional 1:1 skills and on-the-job support for 20 learning disabled women (age 18-45+) from Hackney.
The programme is run in two groups divided by level of support and individual needs. Both groups will attend weekly IT courses for 9 weeks and four general employment skills training (time and money management, effective work communication, soft skills).
The high-needs group of 10 severely disabled women (users with Down’s syndrome, autism, cerebral palsy, global development delay, restricted mobility) will receive basic IT training and practice tasks specifically requested by their current/ potential employers on our employment placement scheme. The lower support needs group of 10 women with moderate learning disabilities will receive more advanced training leading to a ITQ certification.
These users have lost jobs in Covid/ Brexit job cuts and the 2-month programme will also offer them individually tailored 1:1 support in our office to raise their IT skills and improve their employability. Employability training will be delivered by our experienced employment support staff with guest trainers – employers from businesses we partner with and a therapist specialising in teaching life skills to learning disabled audiences.
Teen Action’s mission is to give marginalised, excluded and disadvantaged young women (many from BAME communities), access to bespoke courses, programs and 1:1 support, helping them to reach their potential; and to ease the transition to adulthood, employment and independent living.
Annually, we support over 200 young women aged 15-19 years, improving participants’ capabilities, confidence, workplace skills, attainment and mental/emotional wellbeing, through a variety of quality youth-led provisions delivered in line with our London Youth Gold Quality Mark, a programme accredited by City & Guilds.
‘Get a Job’ is our essential employability spring-summer program, which provides an introduction to entering the workforce for young women transitioning to employment and has been developed to reflect the pandemic/ post-pandemic work environments and the opportunities and challenges they present.
Lewisham
Young Lewisham Project offers supportive alternative vocational programs to young people who may not be achieving their full potential in mainstream education and are vulnerable/at risk or involved with the police or youth offending teams. YLP supports young people to become confident, active citizens and take responsibility for their lives. Our weekly programme includes motorcycle & bicycle maintenance, carpentry, furniture restoration, art, drama and theatre sessions, cooking and gardening. We give young people the skills, knowledgeand confidence to progress onto further education/training or employment.
Tower Hamlets
Bags of Taste tackles food poverty at source, supporting vulnerable people who live in poverty so they can be happier, healthier and have better finances. Our work means that people can be more reliant on themselves to prepare healthy, affordable food for less than £1 a portion and this creates stronger and healthier communities.
Pre-pandemic, we were running face to face cookery courses in the community however we have now completely repurposed our offer and have delivered nearly 1,600 Mentored home cooking courses. We are reaching new audiences – single parents, people with severe anxiety/mental health issues and people with hearing impairments who would not ordinarily access face to face courses.
Tower Hamlets is one of the most deprived boroughs of London with 57% of children living in poverty, food bank usage has skyrocketed and the recent cut to universal credit has meant that this situation has worsened. We empower and give people the tools, so they are in control of what they and their families eat now and this impacts on future generations.
Waltham Forest
Inspire Education Business Partnership works across the London boroughs of Hackney, Camden, Islington and beyond. Working with up to 15,000 young people each year, we deliver a combination of in-school and workplace-based activities to help young people aged 3-24 see and understand the world of work.
We will run a specialist employability programme for a group of ten vulnerable year 11 students with Special Educational and Mental Health Needs (SEMH) at Belmont Park School, an alternative provision based in Waltham Forest. Our highly tailored three-part programme will raise the pupils’ aspirations and create pathways into employment by preparing them for work experience, offering supported work placements in local businesses and a comprehensive follow-up.
The COVID crisis has already had a significant impact on young people with disruption to schooling, and this is disproportionately affecting those who already experience disadvantage; it is estimated that only 5% of vulnerable students engaged with home learning during the pandemic, impacting on both their behaviour and engagement now that they are back full-time.
Redbridge
Healthy Living Projects Limited are supporting vulnerable women attending the Welcome Centre, our flagship day provision for homeless/vulnerable adults. Typically, the Centre receives over 45 client visits per day. Of the people we come into contact, 100% are unemployed, 84% are representative of Eastern European, Black and Asian minority groups and up to 80% with a mental health diagnosis (depression, Bi-polar Disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress, Schizophrenia, dual diagnosis with drug/alcohol dependency). Our aim is to help those that we work with to live independent healthy, fulfilled lives by addressing their complex needs, language barriers and poor basic skills.
The Welcome Project supports, on average, 45 people on a daily basis presenting with challenging and difficult behaviour. People may be in crisis due to homelessness, experience food poverty, or have severe mental health disorders, exacerbated by their misuse of alcohol and/or drugs. Through regular engagement and support from our expert team, people’s physical and mental health improves, their lifestyle becomes less chaotic, their use of drugs/alcohol reduces including their involvement in crime/anti-social behaviour. People gain new hope for the future and start to consider their aspirations.
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