2022-12-31-accounts

job search Annual report 2022 volunteering skills Froncis CJ support ffflployobility

Who we are

• We are a Project, registered as a charity, based within an Anglican Parish Church in Coventry, working across an area which has pockets of deprivation

• ranked in the top 10% and 20% in the country.

• We work with people from all over Coventry, a city with higher-than-average unemployment and deprivation and a city that takes more Syrian (and other) refugees than any other local authority outside of London. Based in a church building in the heart of Radford, our primary aim is to transform our community and transform the lives of local people by helping people to move forward to social and financial inclusion and employment/education. The church itself was registered as a charity in 2017, however the church had been operating as a charity with exempted status since 1951. Our Employability Project (called St Francis Employability) delivers support services for unemployed people living in Coventry and was registered as a separate charity in 2019.

• 2022 was a very busy and exciting year for St Francis Employability, being the first year without any covid 19 restrictions for 2years we were able

• to plan forward more freely and explore more opportunities for us as a charity and our clients. We have grown as a charity, taken on supporting new groups in need and have expanded and adapted ourprojects to support our community more widely.

• We are continuing to engage with people across the city in a variety of different ways delivering help and support in creative ways to the community.

• We continue to work in close partnership with a number of other local organisations, including Coventry City Council, West Midlands police, CRMC, Positive Youth, CCA, Coventry Building Society, UHCW, local schools and others to achieve targets of social inclusion, integration and promote understanding within communities, as well as supporting people to better able to live independently and be meaningful employed and economically active.

Our aims and activities

• Our aims and activities are listed on the Charity Commission site as ‘to provide employability support through job search, CV writing, skills training and accredited qualifications and integration support and community cohesion’. We are listed as delivering education and training, preventing and relieving poverty and supporting economic and community development and employment. We provide services and advocacy, support and information.

Our aim throughout 2022 was to grow and expand the work we already offer, ensuring we are reaching those most in need within the city and delivering the best support we can. New client groups have emerged and with these have come new challenges which have informed our service offer. Changes in the cost of living have also created challenges and meant we have had to adapt our services to meet the changing needs of those we are working with.

Partnerships

• We work in partnership with many local organisations – statutory and 3[rd] sector.

• Our partnerships have grown over

• the past year with new opportunities for projects to begin have allowed us to connect further.

• We have continued to

grow relationships within 2022 with a new relationship emerging with the NHS and UHCW and also relationships with partners such as Coventry City Council and Coventry Building Society have strengthened throughout the year.

Governance

• We have continued to maintain a strong governance structure throughout 2022.

• We have our chair of trustees, 2 church representatives and 2 community representatives as trustees who have supported us in flourishing throughout the year.

Our Projects

Reaching Communities

• Reaching communities has been our longest standing project within St Francis Employability and is our core activity within our building.

What is reaching communities?

Reaching communities is our core service for engaging with the community through employment and community support and consists of; a volunteering programme where individuals can engage in practical work experience in an area of interest to them, learn new skills and gain confidence in a work environment alongside one to one support from our volunteer coordinator; our community café which provides breakfast and lunch to all, Monday to Friday free of charge; employment support provided by our employment officer which includes CV writing, job search support, interview skills and support with other work related needs; community support from our community support officer who can provide personalised support surrounding issues such as benefits, debt, housing, bills, and more; and as a more recent addition we have our social supermarket which offers a life line to those who are struggling significantly with debt, housing, benefits and employment. All of our support is also made accessible to all by being free and because we have a creche facility available those who have children can come and be confident their children will be safe and looked after while they engage in our support. It is vital for us that we are able to offer this support to anybody that needs it. We are all to aware of the restrictions that some funding programmes put in place and we want our support to be inclusive. We do not want to turn people away because they do not fit a certain “category”.

These activities as a whole allow us to provide holistic support to our community, tailoring specific help to their needs and helping them to make meaningful change towards independence and stability.

Reaching Communities

• Throughout 2022 we continued to offer our reaching communities projectface to face and to everyone in the community. Our

• reaching communities project has for the majority of the year been unfunded due to our National Lottery funding finishing in March 2022 and we have relied on small pockets of funding to maintain the projects throughout the year. We have however still managed to deliver on the project and help it grow, meeting the needs of the community and more.

• We have found that the demand for appointments particularlyfor community support have risen throughout 2022, this is due to the

• rising cost of living, including food and energy prices. In 2022 we held over 900 appointments to support with community supportissues alone. This is inclusive of housing, energy bills, benefits and debt management. We also offered 845 appointments to support with CV's, job search and job applications. Over 50% of those engaging in our support services are from BAME backgrounds and many are refugees/asylum seekers.

• We have had a successful year for volunteering with over 180 volunteers come and participate in our work, supporting in the

• kitchen, on reception, as playworkers, cleaners, gardeners and more. All volunteers have participated in training and support, as a result35 volunteers have moved in to paid employment and 97% feel they have gained more confidence and work-based skills.

• Volunteer stats: 42% were male and 58% were female. 10% were white British and the rest were from other ethnicities.

• Throughout 2022 we have also started friendship groups under our reaching communities project that were aimed towards those

• that were experiencing isolation and loneliness as an impact of thepandemic in 2020/21. We started a three groups in total:

• A craft group – aimed at encouraging people to come and share in a hobby will making friends and communicating with others.

• A women's group – we found that throughout 2022 we were working with increasing numbers of women who were raising issues of DV and abuse and who needed support with this. As a result, we had 3 staff members attend training to be DV champions within the workplace and we started the women's group to encourage women to come out into the community, make friends, and also to have a safe space to share and raise issues if needed.

• A sports group – this group was aimed at young men, typically asylum-seeking men, who were experiencing isolation and loneliness. The group is run by a staff member who has previously been through the asylum route and who wanted to engage young asylum-seeking men in physical activities while also supporting them in building friendships and having a safe space to explore their worries and any issues they are facing.

Reaching Communities

• Looking forward in to 2023 we have plans

• to seek more permanent sources of funding for the reaching communities project and to continue to expand and adapt to the needs of the community.

• We hope to establish new friendship

• groups and work them towards being more client and volunteer led.

• In 2023 we have a new full time volunteer

• coordinator starting who we are hoping can ensure volunteers are getting all the support they need and more. Our hope is they can grow within the role and help bring new ideas to the project.

5 Doors Down

• Our immediate response to the pandemic was to open as an emergency foodbank, working with newly recruited volunteers to deliver food to people who were vulnerable and

shielding. We quickly built up a list of clients through referrals from schools and social workers and Coventry Food bank. During the first few months of the pandemic many thousands of meals and food parcels were delivered, and we were helped massively with funding through local charities.

• We developed the provision through the setting up of a Social Supermarket, to help people move away from dependency on emergency food supplies.

• 5 doors down now ties in really well without reaching communities support and we have been working very hard to establish good links between these two projects and ensure clients are getting a holistic form of support.

5 Doors Down

• In 2022 5 Doors Down has grown into a core activity of ours with a significant number of people who come through our doors engaging in some aspect of this project. We have found this has been a significantly busy year for the 5 doors down project with more and more people relying on food support due to the cost-of-living crisis.

• We continue to act as a foodbank offering emergency parcels and fulfilling vouchers twice a week. Throughout 2022 we have fulfilled 857 parcels thus supporting approximately 1370 adults and children with emergency food. This is approximately 200 more parcels than in 2021.

• We have aimed throughout 2022 to ensure we are more than just emergency food support to our foodbank members, and we worked with staff to ensure they could accurately sign post to forms of help or long-term support mechanisms where needed.

• We have also been part of the household support fund in Coventry offering parcels for collection through this.

• Moving into 2022 we had approximately 25 – 30 members on our social supermarket and leaving 2022 we have had to cap our membership at 60 due to funding and resources and now have a waiting list of approximately 30 members. This shows the rapid rise in the need of the long-term food support we have to offer. Members of our social supermarket are expected to engage in activities to support moving them towards a better financial situation and to ensure they can support themselves, depending on their circumstances this can be a short or long journey.

• We have held 92 registrations this year and have handed out 1204 social supermarket parcels throughout the year.

• We were lucky to get a grant toward our food costs at the beginning of the year which supported with buying staple items for our social supermarket until April. Since then, we have sourced other small pots of money to support food buying throughout the year, but food prices are rising, and we are currently not getting enough in to cover the full cost of our food. We regularly do bookers trips, get ASDA and fresh market deliveries to ensure we offer the best we can to our members.

• We also get donations – although these have slowed down with the rising cost of living - and get surplus food donations from Tesco, Greggs, Marks and Spencer and Nando's that all contribute towards our food offer.

5 Doors Down

• Our aim for 2023 is to seek more sustainable funding for our food and key staff members within this project ensuring we can sustain the support we currently have on offer.

• We also would like to aim to have

• enough funding to be able to increase the cap on our social supermarket membership list enabling us to reach more people through this support offer.

Community Cafe

• Our Community Café serves breakfast and lunch 5 days a week to people who visit our premises. We often offer meals to those in our community who have been rough sleeping, are seeking asylum or who are generally struggling. The meals offer a vehicle to engagement and most of those who we encounter over a meal begin to work with us to address some of the issues they face.

Community Cafe

• We have continued to run our community café throughout 2022 primarily through volunteers and supported by staff.

• We serve on averagebreakfast for 20 people and lunch for 50 people on a daily basis Monday- Friday.

• Previously surplus food donations from Tesco have supported our community café and throughout 2021 we also made connections with Marks & Spencer and Greggs to provide surplus donations of food. This has allowedus to offer some really exciting and different meals to our clients, ensuring everyone gets a nutritious and filling meal every day.

Community cafe

• Moving forward we hope to continue to

• provide our community café as it is a lifeline to many people.

• It is also an amazing opportunity for

• many of our volunteers to get involved in and we see so manypeople benefit and grow from being a part of it.

English for All

• English for All is one of our foundation projects. As Reaching Communities developed, we found more and more of the people we were trying to help into employment needed support with English language.

• We began by teaching English using volunteers but have now employed a tutor to support the daily classes we hold in the building. We have built great links with local schools to offer lessons to the parents of their children, too. We have also committed to working with people seeking asylum in the city, who can’t always access other lessons. We have always struggled to find funding for this project but manage to juggle our finances to provide teaching hours!

English for All

• Our English for all project has always been an inclusive and open project however it has not been a funded project. In June 2022 we were able to source funding for 10 months of delivery of our ESOL lessons – 8 in total – to support pre-entry to E3 learners.

• In 2022 we saw a significant rise in demand for ESOL lessons and we currently have over 200 people on a waiting list for classes. We have carried out 313 ESOL assessments throughout 2022.

• Throughout 2022 we have engaged with approximately 265 students in English support.

• Towards the end of 2022 we got great news that we have received another years' worth of funding for these lessons from April 2023 so these lessons are funding until the end ofMarch 2024.

English for All

• In 2023 we hope that we would be able to

• increase the number of lessons we are able to offer and therefore reach more people in the city seeking support with English.

• We are also planning on engaging in some

• of the hotels within Coventry housing Asylum seekers and offering English to the residents.

Refugee Integration

• Since 2016 we have worked in a local partnership, led by Coventry City Council to support newly arrived refugees. We have worked with people from Syria, Iraq, Sudan and Yemen to help them settle into the city, to begin to learn English, to gain confidence and look for work. This project has become part of our core delivery and we employ 7 staff to engage with these clients.

Refugee Integration

• Throughout 2022 we continued to deliver our 8 evening sessions for newly arrived refugees in the city. 6 face to face and 2 online.

• The levels of the classes constantly adapt to the varying levels and numbers of students we have coming.

• We also have playworkers who regularly attend the sessions to ensure the children are also learning and developing their English skills. Parents can also concentrate on their lessons, confidently knowing their children are cared for.

• We have also continued wider support for this client group with many engaging with our volunteering opportunities, workclub and community support and also food support.

• The lessons have also been opened up to Ukrainian refugees to further support them with their English. We have also started working with Ukranians amoungstother projects including our volunteering and My Coventry project to support them with integration and employment aims.

Refugee Integration

• We hope to continue delivering our ESOL and wider support to refugees throughout the city and working and adapting with the new groups coming into Coventry.

STEP

• STEP is a project that we were commissioned by the local council to deliver, through AMIF funding received by World Jewish Relief. We were asked to work with newly arrived refugees from Syria to help them gain the skills and confidence they needed to move into employment. We source volunteering placements to help with work skills and English practice. We offer support as they settle into their new local communities and help them gain confidence.

STEP

• 2022 has brought the arrival of many new refugees into Coventry with the diversity of those coming over on the resettlement program growing rapidly. We have worked with clients from Palestine, Syria, Afghanistan and Hong Kong on the STEP project in 2022.

• We have worked with 4 cohorts throughout 2022 and approximately 40 clients. 29 gained an accredited qualification in ESOL Employability and this was celebrated amongst other students during our awards evenings.

• Students also engaged with volunteering throughout the course with many working in our community café, supporting on reception and playworkingin our creche.

• Many participants also moved on to other provisions following the course. Joining our health and safety, driving theory and civic courses in particular.

STEP

• Moving forward we will continue to engage with newly arrived groups though the Employability course.

• We aim to work with another 4 cohorts.

LEAP

• LEAP is a commissioned project that began in June 2020. The aim of the funder (Home Office) was to provide pre-entry English support for those who struggled to learn English. We took the very lowest level learners and worked intensively with them for 12 weeks to help them move into mainstream English classes. In 2021 we were given the opportunity to run a second round of 2 quarters to deliver this project.

LEAP

• The final cohort of the LEAP project ran from January to April 2022.

• Throughout this cohort we engaged with 43 students from 19 different countries.

• The majority of students went on to engage in other English activities, volunteering or our other training courses.

LEAP

• LEAP funding came to an end in April 2022 and there are no immediate plans for it to be extended.

My Coventry is an AMIF funded project and began January of 2021. It is funded for 2 years which will take us to the end of 2022.

The primary aim of the project is to support third country nationals with employment and integration needs. We are one of 6 partners working on the project.

My Coventry

• 2022 has been a fantastic year for My Coventry with us really being able to engage with a large number of clients and support them in making real progression towards employment and integration in the city. We have engaged with new clients 212 and continued to work with 104 clients beyond their first engagement and into other quarters.

• We have worked to support 203 beneficiaries through accredited skills courses, including Employability,Health and Safety, Food Hygiene, and IT.

• We have also supported 45 beneficiaries into work.

• The My Coventry project was also opened up to Ukrainians when Russia started invadingUkraine in order to provide support to refugees coming into the UK and supporting them with learning English and working towards employment. We have worked with 13 Ukrainians so far but expect this number to rise going into 2023.

• By far our most engaged group have been Hong Konger's here one BNO visas. We have engaged with 82 on the My Coventry project within 2022.

My Coventry

• The My Coventry project has been funding for a year extension until 31st December 2023.

• We will continue to deliver our core activities under this project and look to support the target client group the best we can, adapting and changing to their emerging needs.

Progress in Coventry

• Progress in Coventry began in November of 2021. Its primary aim is to support newly

• awarded refugees who have come through the asylum route with housing and employment.

• We are a partner on this project managed by Coventry City Council and alongside ACH

• and Spring Housing.

• Our aim on the project is to support with volunteering meeting outcomes on

• intermediated employment.

• This fund is different from other projects we have been part of before and is outcome

• based.

• Through this project we were able to employ a volunteer coordinator whose role is to

• source external placements for volunteers on the project.

Progress in Coventry

• Progress in Coventry has been one of our slower projects, it took a while to get off the ground and into the swing of things.

• Throughout 2022 however we have engaged with 25 clients through the project successfully placing them in volunteering.

• Some of the volunteer roles they have undertaken have included working in a community Café, administration support, working in our social super Market and food bank, gardening, and conservation and as an accounting assistant with a local charity.

• RTOF is currently expanding its offer of volunteer placements across Coventry to be able to meet the needs of our client groups and the careers they wish to pursue.

• We have learnt that often volunteering, although key in gaining work experience in the UK, learning English and building confidence, it is often the last thing on the participants minds. We have had some push back from clients so have been trying to look at incentives to volunteer and we have been offering a holistic style of support where we explore additional learning and opportunities they can join in with while doing their volunteering.

Progress in Coventry

• For 2023 we have a new Volunteer

• coordinator within the project and our aim is to continue to engage in project clients and support them into volunteering.

• We will continue to build relationships

• with external volunteering opportunities.

• We would also like the Volunteer coordinator to look at engaging with the many asylum seekers in the city who, when they receive their refugee status, will be eligible for the project. The aim of this is to build relationships and expectations early.

BNO support

• In 2021 we learned of a new group of

• migrants coming to the UK from Hong Kong on British National's Overseas visas.

• We were very keen to work with this client

• group and explore their support needs.

• Initially it was a challenge to make contact

• with this group of clients. Many are very wealthy and move to more affluent areas of Coventry and surrounding areas, they are also dispersed throughout the city making it harder to connect with them.

• We eventually made contact with a small

• group of clients, introducing ourselves and having conversations about the support we could offer them and how we could work with them moving forward.

BNO Support

• 2022 was a very busy year for BNO support, across the year we supported 148 BNO's across all our projects and also activities targeted at them.

• We have run 4 integration classes this year aimed at teaching newly arrive BNO's about UK culture, traditional and history.

• We also managed to join the DELTA scheme where we could get some funding for those needing additional ESOL support. BNO's generally have quite high levels of English so we put on weekly classes to support them with understanding English dialects and to support their spoken and written English.

• BNO's also joined many of our My Coventry provisions with 82 of them completing skills classes and accreditations.

• We have also supported approximately 30 BNO's into work in 2022.

• We also planned and organised a BNO open day at the Coventry Building Society arena and invited multiple organisations, including schools, voluntary organisations, employment support agencies and more, that could offer support to the BNO community. We had over 150 BNO’s attend this event learning more about what support there is within Coventry for them.

• We have encountered some barriers with supporting BNO's into employment with organisations such as schools and the NHS being very hard to enter employment in, predominately due to DBS issues.

• We are relaying this information to local authorities with hopes of supporting clients through the issue.

• We have this year started to build a relationship with the NHS and UHCW. We want to ensure that our clients have accessible routes into key employment sectors within Coventry and we are beginning to establish good relationships with employers to aid this. We held meetings with ladies that work within UHCW and who wanted to support us in helping clients into work and volunteering, they recognised the barriers our clients can face sometimes and supported us in looking at ways around these. The relationship has resulted in regular tours of the UHCW for our clients looking behind the scenes at the different roles they have within the hospital. They also had some bank admin positions available and created a private link for us to share with our BNO clients who we believe would be good for this role. We had 14 apply and 8 successfully gain employment within the role. We hope this relationship will continue within 2023.

BNO Support

• Moving forward our aim is to continue to

• support BNO's in the next year.

• We will continue to deliver our integration

• and ESOL classes specifically for BNO's and will continue to communicate with them about their needs and challenges, adapting our provisions to meet these.

• We also hope to maintain our relationship

• with UHCW with 4 tours planned in 2023.

Staffing

• At the end of 2022 we have 28 members of

• staff on payroll.

• 2022 has been a year of minimal staff

• change however the end of the year did see 3 members of staff move on.

• Moving into 2023 we have 25 members of

• staff.

28 Staff still on payroll

Looking forward

Priorities for 2023:

• Continue to expand our services and adapt to the needs of those we are working with.

• Explore more relationships with businesses and organisationsto grow work opportunties

• and routes to employment.

• To look for funding opportuntiesfor beyond 2023 when many of our funded projects end

• in December 2023.

Annual Accounts 2022

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