From 2007-08 Renaisi was commissioned to support the programme management of Hackney’s City Strategy Pathfinder programme, Ways into Work, which seeks to transform the way that the council engages with unemployed and economically inactive residents, and how that engagement further links individuals into end-to-end employability support, including access to one-to-one support, basic skills and technical skills development, and direct access to employers.
Renaisi led on the design, development and delivery of this £870,000 programme. The key to our CSP’s end to end approach is the engagement of the housing sector in tackling worklessness. Our programme brings together a partnership of the major housing providers in the Borough with the ability and interest to tackling worklessness and uses their trusted status amongst residents and local networks to disseminate information. This is done via their local infrastructure and staff – housing offices, community centres. Additionally, our CSP approach uses housing services to help overcome residents’ barriers to employment, such as re-locating residents closer to their place of work, fast tracking housing benefit claims for residents who lose employment, removing the risk of them becoming homeless.
In the initial stages, the programme commissioned nine housing providers and two employment support organisations to identify and deliver services to unemployed residents in Hackney. As the CSP has developed, additional statutory and private sector partners have been incorporated into the programme, including JCP, The Learning Trust (Families Support Unit, Childcare funding, Adult Learning Services), On Site – the local job brokerage with access to jobs on the Olympic site, and five LSC funded ESOL providers.
The CSP programme was been very effective at supporting unemployed and economically people in Hackney back into work, and helped over 750 people in the borough into sustained employment in the first 12 months. Since then the programme has further developed to incorporate more local partners, has been funded via the Working Neighbourhoods Fund, has match funded the borough’s LDA co-financed ESF (European Social Fund) programme, and has continued to be successful in moving local residents into sustained employment.
