By Juno Schwarz | Director of Fundraising & Communications
Dear friend,
The end of 2021 is near and we’re happy to look back at a challenging yet successful year. In the face of the ongoing pandemic, it is truly incredible what our community has achieved:
Over the past quarter, your support has further enabled 5 care-experienced young people to successfully complete work placements and move into sustainable employment by covering essential work-related costs like home WiFi or travel to work.
Here’s a flavour of their stories.
Making a career out of lived experience - Emma
Emma started working with Drive Forward in February this year. The recent graduate was looking for anything form work experience, to a part-time job, to fulltime employment. Emma’s previous experience working with different groups of people with complex needs including young offenders and disadvantaged youth, as well as her friendly and hard-working nature, enabled her to land multiple jobs within a short period of time. But only when she was offered a role within a local authority, supporting care-experienced children and young people and enabling them to progress in their lives, Emma knew that she had found her place and a career she would enjoy for years to come.
“Working with the council and young people is much more to me than just ‘giving back’. It allows me to use my own personal experience, the good and the very bad, to make a change and help people... achieve their goals and build their lives.”
2 steps forwards, 1 step backwards - Ruby
Ruby was only 18 when she first walked through our doors in 2015. At the time, we were still running a 6-weeks long employability skills building programme. Ruby was one the individuals highlighting to us how unrealistic our expectation of committing to such a long course were for young people, especially for those struggling with their mental health or personal circumstances, for instance, insecure housing or financial hardship. In Ruby’s case, she had to drop out of the course due to her at the time untreated anxiety and depression. Soon after, we decided to discontinue the programme and switched to a fully person-centred approach instead, with a diverse training and experience offer based on the interests and needs of young people currently working with us.
As the years went by, Ruby continued to fight for herself, trying to build a life for herself, always making progress before falling behind again. There are many care-experienced young people like Ruby, who may receive some support with their mental health whilst being care, but then loosing access once they turn 18. Our care-experienced policy forum has been campaigning to improve services for young adults from care since 2020!
As we continued to hear stories of inadequate or lacking support, despite the clear need for a tailored and bespoke approach, we decided to established an in-house counselling service in 2020. The offer was received really well by young people and it allowed us to offer Ruby the support she needed when she felt ready enough to get back in touch with us in 2021. We soon noticed slight changes in her confidence and behavior, and within a few weeks we felt comfortable enough to put her forward for an internship opportunity in retail with one of our corporate partners. They were so impressed with her performance, that they offered her an apprenticeship!
With your generous support of Closing the Gap, you’ve enabled Emma to buy a travel card, allowing her to meet her care-experienced clients in their own neighbourhoods. Ruby was not only able to complete her internship without having to worry about money for lunch and travel, but also to continue her career progression on the apprenticeship.
THANK YOU!
If you want to learn more about this and other initiatives please subscribe to our newsletter.
Thank you for your ongoing support and believing in the potential of young people!
Want to find out more about our work, the young people we support, or how you can get involved? Give me a shout at juno@driveforwardfoundation.org :)
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
