We are extremely pleased to announce that we have received a £20,000 grant from Garfield Weston Foundation.  This donation will help fund our life-changing ACE programme and will go towards the core costs of providing opportunities for over a thousand disadvantaged individuals to enable them to fulfil their potential.  We are very grateful for their generous donation and support and look forward to working with them in the future.

We are delighted to announce that LEAP will be a charity of the year for the Clothworkers’ Foundation and that we will be awarded a grant of approximately £20,000. The funds will be for a project of supporting NEET young people to transform their lives and enable them to play a fuller role in society. We are extremely grateful to the Clothworkers’ Foundation for their generous donation and look forward to working with them.

 We are delighted to announce that LEAP has received a donation of £25,000 from HSBC Holdings Plc.  We are extremely grateful to Douglas Flint CBE and HSBC for this generous donation and their continued support in helping us transform the lives of disadvantaged young people and jobless adults.

Tunde Banjoko OBE, LEAP’s Chief Executive, said “the support of businesses, trusts & foundations and private individuals is providing LEAP with the crucial funds needed to continue to work with those people who are unable to find the assistance they need anywhere else.  At this time where accessing government funds is proving so difficult, we are particularly grateful to HSBC and Douglas Flint CBE for their generosity and foresight.”

One of the country’s leading philanthropists is asking people to give more and we at LEAP support his aims.

“Give More is a campaign which seeks to empower individuals by asking us all to think about how we can make a difference to the world around us. Just imagine what our country could look and feel like in a year’s time if we all came together and collectively pledged more money, time or energy to the charities and community groups that are working so hard through such a difficult time. We hope that by making a pledge, everyone will be encouraged not only to celebrate what they do already, but also somehow find a little more money time or energy to promise important causes close to their hearts over the next year.” – Trevor Pears, Chair of Give More

To find out more about Give More, please see the website at givemore.org.uk.

To donate to LEAP, please use our website or contact Mandy Betts on 020 8962
1900 or mandy@leap.org.uk

We are delighted to announce that we have been successful in our application to Big Lottery Fund for the Big Lottery Supporting Changing grant and will be awarded £150,000 from November 2012. This funding will help us develop a multimedia version of our acclaimed training programmes that transform the lives of disadvantaged people.

LEAP Chief Executive, Tunde Banjoko OBE, said: “we are grateful to the Big Lottery Fund for this award and for their support over the years.  Their foresight has enabled us to help hundreds of people over the years and this grant will result in us helping thousands more.”

29^th February saw LEAP successfully host a reception for ‘LEAP DAY’.  This was the first in what will be a series of events designed to raise awareness of how LEAP transforms lives and to raise some much-needed funds.

Kindly sponsored by Nomura Plc, Roast and Bordeaux Wine Company the event gave the guests the opportunity to speak to staff and existing “friends of LEAP”.  Without doubt, the highlight of the evening was being able to hear, first-hand, the moving stories from two of our young clients on how LEAP has helped them change their lives and they were now able to become part of mainstream society that they were previously excluded from.

One of the clients, Paul (19), who spoke at the event, said “LEAP gives young people the opportunity to come off the streets and get support.  If I hadn’t come to LEAP I don’t know where I would be now but it would probably be on a negative path.  Thanks to LEAP I am on a positive path.”

LEAP Chief Executive, Tunde Banjoko OBE, said “I am so proud of the young people who spoke this evening, not only for their courage in sharing their stories, but also for the way they have taken the opportunity to turn their lives around.  They are a powerful testament to LEAP’s work and we will continue to help many others just like them.”

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.

LEAP have partnered up with jobserve live! and will be holding a Job Fair at Hammersmith Town Hall on 8^th March from 12pm-7pm and 9^th March from 12pm-4pm.  The shows will feature a wide range of recruiting employers and training and education providers plus advice clinics, seminars, demonstrations and other features.

Entry is free of charge so make sure to register ASAP.  Make sure you visit the LEAP stand for more information on how we can help you in your job search.

For further information and to register Click 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