Local residents and organisations have had beautiful soft landscaping jobs completed by a particularly special team of skilled local people. The team is special because it is a group of vulnerable people with mental health needs. The team is supported and managed by Workability. Workability is part of the charity Impact Initiatives which has been funded by the Hastings Regeneration Partnership for five years. The whole idea behind the team and the funding has been to provide practical skills and paid employment specifically to Hastings people with mental health needs.
The local environmental improvements team has been so successful at winning and carrying out contracts, that it will soon become a Social Firm.
Workability has proved its ability in giving local vulnerable people practical skills and paid employment. It’s heart-warming that the project has worked out so well that the organisers should be determined to continue with its work independently.
As a firm, the group will continue to provide horticultural and landscaping services throughout the town. During 2004, the project completed many types of contracts. They helped Hastings Borough Council to maintain some of the new cycle and pedestrian paths, part of the Hastings Greenway. The Greenway links many parts of the town with a network of landscaped paths to encourage people to get out into the open air as they go about their daily business of getting to school, to the shops or to work. The team is currently planting trees and shrubs in Wallingers Walk, off Castle Hill Road, where it recently placed oak benches it had made to order.
If you would like a quotation for works, please contact Paul Hayward of Workability on (01424) 756300 or 07766 132449.
If you would like training, please telephone Workability on (01323) 416788. Workability currently has a few vacancies.
In January 2002, 13 Year 9 students embarked upon a pilot mentoring project, called Firm Friends. All the students were girls who had been identified as 'slipping' and were getting into trouble. None were expected to achieve their full potential.
Hastings and Rye Education Business Partnership had the idea to link these girls with their very own adult mentor. The idea was to support them to the end of the school year. This was a brand new idea and one that Hastings Regeneration Partnership was quick to support.
Now, two years later, their former headteacher is delighted to say:
"It has been two years since the Firm Friends project and the girls progressed well. All 13 carried on to do their GCSEs. As far as I know, all are still in full-time education, either at college or in the federal sixth doing vocational courses. The girls gained an average of eight GCSEs each. One of the girls did particularly well, she worked hard to get seven GCSEs at the higher A* - C level. Even the most wayward received glowing reports for her work experience placement in the vet surgery, ‘KS4’ and pulled out all the stops to get five GCSE passes! A pretty good result, I think."
Firm Friends matched each student with a mentor. These mentors came from a wide range of business experience. The least experienced, but highly motivated member of the mentor group was an auxiliary nurse. There was also an engineer, a fire fighter, a reporter, a training manager and a teacher. All the mentors were women. The mentors visited the girls each week at school and attended mentor group support and training sessions. Some of the mentors even went on to take the BTEC in mentoring.
In May, the whole group, that’s the 13 girls and the mentors, went away for an Outward Bound weekend. Everyone said that spending quality time together was fantastic and it gave the students access to the entire range of the mentors’ occupational experience. Some students said that it was the best time they had ever had. One said that she had not previously thought she had friends. Even though the pilot project finished at the end of the school year, the girls continued to support each other through the difficult change over from lower to upper school.
Part eight of our jargon-buster
Someone experienced to listen and to guide both career and life goals.
A social firm is a business set up to create employment for an identifiable community or for a specific group of vulnerable people. Social firms are committed to the social and economic integration of the specific group of people through employment at market wages. They provide supportive workplaces where the working environment provides opportunity and meaningful work. Social firms are businesses that operate in the social, not-for profit sector. They aim to seek new and innovative solutions to social problems.
Work Tasters are short, flexible placements to help people clarify their career choices and to try out different working environments.
Hastings Regeneration Partnership brings together the voluntary, public and private sectors to spend £26 million Single Regeneration Budget money provided through South East England Development Agency. With matched funding, the 100 local projects pull in a total of £128 million for social, economic and physical regeneration.
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This page last updated: 08/04/2005