By Juno Schwarz | Fundraising and Communications Officer
As the days get shorter and the nights cooler we are once more reminded how much of an impact your support can have on a young person’s life. Over the past months, you have enabled over 20 young individuals to take the next step in their careers, gain invaluable work experience, increase their knowledge, improve their skills and find fulltime sustainable employment. For this, we would like to say a BIG THANK YOU!
In our last report, we shared the great news with you that our efforts to make corporate partners more aware of the specific circumstances young care-experience people face have paid off. Many of them are now offering to cover young people’s travel and lunch expenses during the time of their placement. Others have even managed to change their payroll procedures in order to be able to pay young people on a fortnightly basis, helping them to ease into a monthly payment schedule. Once again, a well-deserved thank you to all our fantastic corporate partners!
It is this commitment to improve outcomes for care leavers in London from yourself and our partners, that enable us to do the job we can. And it is also thanks to you, that we’re now able to provide even more support to the young people working with us through the Closing The Gap Fun. For young people from care, having to choose between heating and eating is often the harsh reality, especially in winter. This is why we’ve decided to scrap the fund’s limitation of the first month of work and transform it into a general hardship fund. How can we expect from a young person to fully focus on finding a job if their only concern is how many blankets, jumpers and jackets they can find in order to stay warm in their homes? How can we ask them to perform well, if they’re fighting against constant hunger? We can’t. And we shouldn’t.
With the changes we’ve put in place, your support will now enable even more young people from care to focus on their career goals and drive forward.
Joy, 19 - It takes sacrifice to fulfill your dreams
Joy’s ultimate aim is to be a successful film director. The 19-years old woman is ambitious, driven and prepared to work hard for her dream. She enjoys writing scripts and has loads of fantastic ideas for different plots, set-ups and actors, she loved dark drama independent films and her passion has allowed her to meet brilliant film directors and other professionals in the sector. Joy is determined to network, visit festivals and learn more about the nitty-gritty of the sector and how to gain funding to create a film.
Joy is aware that it’s going to be a long way before she will be able to realise her goal, but she is certain that it is worth it. She put enormous efforts into writing to production companies and TV stations to gain a placement and increase her insight into production. Her perseverance paid off and Joy was offered a job as a runner with a TV post production company in London. Congratulations!
However, having no savings in the bank and no financial support from family, Joy worried that the travel to and from work would have a steep impact on her monthly budget. The job itself is only £5,90 per hour with flexible working hours up to 45h a week, but Joy is committed to her goal and willing to sacrifice as much as she can.
Thanks to your generous support, Joy could accept the job without having to worry about her travel. She gained some valuable experience looking behind the scenes of a post-production company. With this experience on her CV, Joy has now moved on from this position and is eager to find an opportunity with a film production company next year.
Henry, 22 – small steps to success
Henry is 22 years old and has already defeated the odds as he has just gone back to uni to complete his degree in Computer Science and Network Communications. He is one of the 6% of care-experienced people going into higher education at the age of 19.
Having a degree is not enough in today’s job market, not even in a tech field like computer science. What really matters to employers is work experience and the right attitude. Knowing this, Henry was looking for a summer job to complement his studies and gain insight into some of the industries that he wishes to work in later on: financial services, legal and pollical services, marketing and advertising, security, transport, or sales.
At Drive Forward we appreciate young individuals with a wide spectrum of interests as it allows us to offer them a vast range of work placement and employment opportunities with our dedicated corporate partners. When Henry voiced his goal for the coming weeks, we had just gained a new opportunity with our partners at Lloyds Banking Group. They were offering a 1 week work placement to enable young people to learn more about the workings of daily financial service provision. Henry was very eager to go onto this placement and put a brilliant application together.
Closing the Gap then enabled Henry to smoothly travel from Zone 4 into the city every day.
“I cannot even describe how great it was. Every day I spent there was amazing!” - Henriques
For more stories and updates about events and volunteering opportunities please sign up to our mailing list!
Links:
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
Support this important cause by creating a personalized fundraising page.
Start a Fundraiser
