It comes around but only once every four years and this 29^th February, LEAP Day, we are holding a reception to celebrate our success and to raise funds.

With unemployment the highest for 16 years, one in four young people out of work and so many children coming out of school without the skills needed to get a job, the services that LEAP provides have never been more important.  At the event to be held at our training centre, Harriet Tubman House, you will be able to hear inspiring stories from people whose lives have been changed by LEAP.

Thanks to sponsorship from companies including Nomura plc, Roast Restaurant and Bordeaux Wine Company, the event will raise funds to run our youth club and training programmes for disadvantaged young people and jobless adults.  A number of local individuals are also supporting the event.

LEAP client, 19 year old Louis, says:  “I left school early with no qualifications and I was getting in trouble with the police.  I first came to LEAP through its youth club and from there I joined and successfully completed its Intermediate IT course.  LEAP has made a massive difference to my life, my confidence has grown and I now believe that I can have a positive future all thanks to LEAP.”

Chief Executive Tunde Banjoko OBE said “My sincere thanks to the sponsors, local companies and individuals for their support and generous donations. At this event we will raise much needed funds for our work with children and adults and make a real difference to the community that we serve.  My thanks to the local community who have got behind this event and will make it a huge success.”

For further information about LEAP or tickets to attend the LEAP DAY event, please contact Mandy Betts on 020 962 1900, email mandy@leap.org.uk

If you cannot attend, please consider making a donation via this website.

Successfully engaging with disaffected young people is difficult, and there are few organisations with the necessary credibility, experience, track record and capacity.

Our Chief Executive Tunde Banjoko wrote a piece about helping young people move away from a life of crime. The piece was published on The Guardian on February 14  – you can read the full article here.

Four months ago I started working at LEAP as a volunteer.  Although the bulk of my career was spent in advertising I have also run my own catering enterprise and had three children.  I’ve been lucky in life, until I came to LEAP I’d had little direct experience with unemployment.  So, as a relative newcomer, I find every interaction with one of our clients a learning curve. Each case is different and yet there are constant themes which emerge amongst the unemployed – old, young, black, white, Asian. I’m often amazed at the fortitude and sanguineness with which some people face unemployment – at least in the early stages. Yet unemployment is depressing. Ultimately it saps the will to live, with its grinding poverty and faceless bureaucracy. For every person playing apparently milking the system, there is someone who won’t sign on because they find the process humiliating and degrading.

What LEAP offers is a real opportunity to tackle unemployment with a proven and effective way of addressing many of the issues which lead a person to be unemployed. It is no easy journey – challenging as it does an individuals’ perception of who they are and what they need to do to be successful in finding a job.  Though the service is completely free we come across those who have been bounced from scheme to scheme – only to find themselves no further forward. Unsurprisingly they are sceptical about what we can offer and often take a great deal of persuading before they are prepared to take the LEAP that can improve their lives.

If I had to pick one thing which singles out those likely to find employment from those who don’t I believe, simply, it is literacy and communication skills. In a sense that seems so blindingly obvious as to not be worth mentioning. If you have poor communication skills you are going to be at the back of the queue when it comes to the handing out of what few jobs there are around. I guess what shocks me is not that this is such a barrier, but that so many of the people I meet suffer from it. Call me naïve; it took me a while to realize what I was seeing. I was meeting people, seemingly with qualifications – a few GCSE’s here, a BTec there, but when asked even a basic question – for example how they would describe themselves, they are almost incapable of doing so, either verbally or on paper.  Whilst some of these may be recent arrivals in this country, they are by no means the majority. The majority of people I see, who struggle so much with their English, have been educated in this country. They have somehow completed say, 11 years, of education and yet can barely write sentences.  Equally surprising to me is that many of those who struggle so badly to express themselves don’t realise this as a problem. It is as if the collection of certificates vindicates their learning. In their minds they have achievements and the problem is the jobs market, not what they have to offer a future employer.

How has this happened?  Is it a failure of the education system or the demands we place on it? On a recent trip to a state school in South London to help to deliver LEAP’s Employability Skills programme to Year 10 students, there was no doubting the complexity facing teachers – large classes (30 +) of mixed ability, poor behaviour and an environment where frankly even the brightest child would have found it difficult to make much progress.  A group of pretty disengaged students were described by one teacher as “amongst my brightest students, good ones…..”

If it is tough for those who at least have had the advantage of a consistent education, how much harder for those whose education has been interrupted through displacement, whether forced or by choice.  This week alone I met a woman with almost no English who was looking for work. Recently arrived from Hungary we couldn’t help her – she simply didn’t speak enough English to get by. Meanwhile her son is in a state school coping who knows how. Shortly after this I spoke with a young Somali man, gentle, dignified and utterly bewildered. He had arrived in this country at 14, never having been to school and not speaking English. After a year he was placed in a state school. One year on from that he can understand some English but can still barely hold a pen.  I’m guessing that 6 months from now he will have left school to enter some kind of training programme which will again leave him floundering.  After that, unless by some miracle or he finds his way to LEAP, I fear a life of long-term alienation and unemployment.  Having presumably escaped one terrible future it is hard to image the one being offered here will be much more fulfilling.

A further variation on this theme came from two unemployed men I recently met who had post-graduate qualifications – and yet neither could write a sentence that wasn’t littered with grammatical and spelling errors, so bad that the meaning was lost.  Having achieved their goals, both men were baffled that they were unable to find jobs – I guess no one had had the decency to point out the fundamental flaw in their education as they were going along.

In a world where the jobs market continues to shrink and more and more people face a future of intermittent or non-existent work; as the government struggles to find answers to the problems of alienation and lack of opportunity within our communities, it is probably too simplistic to suggest that things might be a whole lot better if people left school having mastered how to read and write, but from what I’ve seen so far, it feels like it would be a good place to start.

Juliet Wilkinson, LEAP volunteer

I have seen a lot, in my 18 years at LEAP.  In fact, I might even have said that I had seen it all until now.  In October 2011, I met a 21 year old man who had recently been released early from prison on licence, which meant that he had to wear a tag and was on a 7am to 7pm curfew.

This young man, I will call him “L”, impressed me immensely and I am not easily impressed.  What drew me to him was the level of responsibility he took for his own actions.  He was not angry with society for his incarceration; he had committed a crime, got caught and was punished, but was now determined never to go back to jail again and wondered if the system would give him a chance to turn his life around. I promised that if he did everything he could, though the road might be longer than it would have been without a conviction, he would get that opportunity to begin again.

L did voluntary work a couple of days a week, peer-mentoring excluded pupils in schools, then on other days he would travel from his home in Thornton Heath (in south east London) to our training centre in Kensal Green (north west London) to be put through his paces by my colleague or to have mentoring sessions with me.  During our sessions I asked L the direct question that I had asked other such young men, “what would it take to ensure that you never committed robbery again” and his answer was the same as theirs “I need a job, I need to be working”.

Unlike many of the others though, L did not sit back and expect it to happen for him, he worked hard with us to get what he wanted and was elated when he found a job working as a Night Receptionist in a hotel.  It was not the job of his dreams, night work and a varying shift, but it was a chance to start again, a chance for him to be defined as something other than an ex-offender.   The required working hours of his new job, meant he would have broken his curfew and so he contacted his probation officer, as he should have, for her to make the necessary arrangements for his curfew to be changed so that he could begin working.  He spoke to her, was given the all-clear and began working on 1^st December.

We kept in touch while he was working, preparing other applications and supported him with an interview for an exciting apprenticeship opportunity working with homeless young people.  L surpassed every expectation we had of him, but on 16^th December he called us to say that his licence had been revoked and that he been recalled to prison.  Unbeknownst to him, dialogue between the Probation Office and the prison had failed to resolve the request to change his curfew hours, so by going to work he was breaching his curfew.  He was devastated.  He had done everything right, yet found himself back in prison.  He lost his job, spent Christmas and New Year in prison and unbelievably languishes there still.  He was originally in Brixton Prison, but now has been moved to Hewell Prison in Worcestershire, where he will be until his original release date.  Myriad contacts by his family to the Ministry of Justice, the prison and probation, have resulted only in various useless utterances of “we are sorry”, “we know” and “it is unfortunate”, but the system is so convoluted that no-one takes responsibility to rectify the mistake.

This is wrong on so many levels:  it is a shocking waste of public money at a time of austerity measures, with the cost of keeping one young person in prison for a year around £60,000; reoffending rates are 26% and one of the major causes of reoffending is unemployment; but worst of all, a  young man who came out of prison and wanted to be a change for good has learnt that had he come out of prison and not bothered to find work, he would have remained free. It is so ridiculous that it cannot be true, but it is.

By Tunde Banjoko OBE
Chief Executive of LEAP

Although LEAP has provided support and training for over 20,000 people and has helped over 5,000 people into employment, we have never received any statutory funding. Since the effective closure of our largest funder, the LDA, and the cessation of its funding, we have not received any public money towards keeping our much needed services going.

A 2008 report by Heath & Roberts (Oxford University)  found that there was a worrying lack of attachment to Britain amongst the countriy’s ethnic minority communities, with it being particularly high (a third or more) amongst African Caribbean young people. The report states “Young people are a relatively vulnerable group, especially given their very high unemployment rates and their greater propensities towards protest and resistance… lack of attachment among young people may have lasting implications for British society.”  Foremost amongst the reasons for this lack of attachment was socio-economic disadvantage (including unemployment, low qualifications and poor job prospects).   Recent events prove that the need for LEAP’s excellent work is greater than ever and our bulging classrooms attest to this.

LEAP Chief Executive, Tunde Banjoko OBE, said “We are very grateful to the Big Lottery Fund, our charitable trust and corporate supporters and the private individuals who have generously given to LEAP, but we need more monetary and other support to continue doing what we do so well.”

If you would like to find out how you can support LEAP, please contact us at info@leap.org.uk or call 020 8962 1900.

We are extremely pleased with the results achieved by our first job fair aimed at unemployed, BME young people. After a month of intense outreach work there were over 260 attendees hoping for an opportunity to break into the job market. The event provided unemployed youths from disadvantaged backgrounds with an opportunity to receive advice, meet with employers and have a real chance of being selected for a range of work related opportunities.

There were 13 companies participating from a range of sectors including retail, hospitality, construction, media, engineering, agriculture, horticulture, etc., and offering a range of openings which contributed to the overall success of the job fair. Opportunities offered included work placements, work experience, volunteer positions, internships, apprenticeships and jobs – truly a great assortment of prospects to meet the different needs of young people seeking to move into the world of work.

After an exhausting day, we were delighted to find out that both businesses and jobseekers were very pleased with the outcome of the event. Comments from the employers included ‘’the organisation of the people attending was excellent’ (London Fire Brigade representative) and ‘an outstanding first fair. Well organised and with a very positive buzz. I need to bring more colleagues next time!’ (Capita representative).

The young people visiting the fair also had very positive comments to share, such as:

‘Thank you very much for holding things like this’
‘I really enjoyed the fair and I hope more of this is done in the future’
‘I found the fair very easy to access, the right information I needed, polite and approachable’
‘You had friendly staff that introduced themselves and were polite at all times. Good job.’

Additionally, we had over 30 specially trained professional volunteers offering attendees individualised advice on how to approach employers. This provided jobseekers with a chance to receive insights and guidance from people currently in employment. However, not only the jobseekers benefitted from this event as the volunteers told us they also enjoyed being able to contribute in helping people in the community. One of the volunteers told us it was ‘a truly fantastic experience. I loved the day and the clients were really interesting to talk to.’

The high attendance and positive feedback received by all the parties involved in the fair has led us to consider holding this event on a more regular basis.

One of our young clients, Shemail Nixon, who we recently placed in an apprenticeship, was interviewed for a piece on Bloomberg news discussing the effects of the current economic crisis and youth unemployment in London.

If you would like to read the whole story please click here.

Our Chief Executive, Tunde Banjoko was featured in PWC’s Private Business magazine providing insights on the importance of responsible leadership in helping businesses and the community successfully develop in the long-term. To read the full article please click here.

LEAP’s CEO writes about why the recent riots should, unfortunately, not come as a surprise.

As I watched the events sparked by the death of Mark Duggan spiral out of control so spectacularly across London and other inner cities, like many people I experienced a range of emotions.  Sadness…dismay…horror…, but the thing that struck me the most was how familiar it all seemed.  Now obviously such widespread rioting doesn’t happen often and many would say that the last week’s events have been unprecedented in both their ferocity and in terms of damage done, still for me seeing young people act with disregard for societal norms is common place.

While I don’t believe that the riots were a race issue, the socioeconomic disadvantage experienced by some of our communities did have a role to play.  High unemployment for black and Asian youths is twice that of their white counterparts.  Poor job prospects and a dearth of youth services are a lethal cocktail that lead to a low sense of attachment to Britain and mainstream society.  In it’s place has been constructed a bond with the local area; the estates that they are from, the gangs to which they belong and they have scant regard for anyone or anywhere else. Such young people commit acts of violence towards each other with frightening regularity, a lot of which goes unreported and, where for most of the country such things are rare, for our inner city young people it is a regular occurrence.  Even those that don’t succumb to it as perpetrator or victim are very aware of it and accept it as part of their daily life.

I have worked with such young people for almost two decades.  We run an employment and training centre and a youth club (that we are only able to open one evening a week), and being so close to them I have had a close insight into their world.  When we ran a programme in schools and asked a group of 15 year olds what other uses than the obvious there could be for a toothbrush, we were greeted with myriad names for a weapon, such as “shank” and “borer”.  For those a few years older it is even more stark, they all know someone who has stabbed or been stabbed, can access a gun by making a quick phone call, risk life and limb if they travel to a red/blue area (which can be 10 minutes down the road) and have to adopt behaviours that stop them from being a perennial victim.  There is a real lack of empathy for anyone outside their family or friends and no understanding of the consequences of their actions.  It is as if their lives are a boot camp, where they become desensitised to other human beings and so can go forward with lives in which the best they aspire to is to be a big time drug dealer.  That said, they are still youths and are not demons, even though in particular circumstances they are capable of evil things, as Donnell Carty and Sanchez Santre Gayle, who both attended our youth club have done.

Now that they have been so dramatically thrust upon an unsuspecting public, we should not be scared of these young people, they were amongst us before these dreadful riots and will be around afterwards.   The rioting has thankfully now stopped and now the criminal justice system must play its part, but I hope it does not end there.  Even if we cannot be empathetic towards them, we must now acknowledge that we have a vested interest in tackling the causes of their alienation.  As Martin Luther King said: “There is nothing more dangerous than to build a society, with a large segment of people in that society, who feel that they have no stake in it; who feel that they have nothing to lose.  People who have a stake in their society, protect that society, but when they don’t have it, they unconsciously want to destroy it.”  At a time when we all accept that there must be a reduction in public spending, the money that is spent must be done wisely, an organisation like ours that manages to get such young people through our doors every day and engages them, they even tell us that “when we are here, we are not causing trouble,” cannot access any public money and were it not for our reserves would have ceased to operate.  In the absence of the right familial influences, we have the choice of these young people only exposed to the mores of the street or to be embraced by professionals in the community that can help them navigate into mainstream society.  What would you rather have?

Tunde Banjoko OBE, LEAP’s CEO