|

1

Share

Community Animators Phase 2

The problem

The idea

Our idea is to build on the success of an innovative pilot project that we ran in Bacup last year in partnership with local community organisations. The project was known as Community Animators and proved to be very effective in helping long term unemployed back to work, increasing skills and confidence amongst participating individuals and improving access to services. It is proposed to extend the project now to cover other areas of Rossendale. The original pilot project recruited 11 people from the target community of Bacup to work as community animators. They were given training to help them engage with the target group of long term unemployed in new and innovative ways providing them with the information, support and mentoring to enable them to take their first steps towards employment and training. The CAs role was to help local people identify their personal barriers to gaining work in a non-judgemental and supportive way. They then encouraged and supported people to overcome these barriers by signposting them to the local services, agencies and organisations who could  provide them with the advice, training and support they needed.   The local challenge that we were seeking to address with this project was the entrenched and persistent long term unemployment situation amongst certain groups and in certain areas of Rossendale. The Community Animators project is innovative in the following ways. It provides a tailored flexible and individualized brokerage service which fills a gap in mainstream provision of employment services. It can provide support over a longer time frame and is not so output driven. It is based in and owned by the community. It is voluntary and holistic in nature carrying no compulsion to participate and catering to a wide variety of needs. Finally it provides an easily replicable delivery model.  

What we need

Tags

NESTACC

Rossendale Borough Council