By Kasia Miadowicz
Learning & Training Coordinator

Well, it’s been a month since I last wrote – and what a month! We had our second visit from the OCN Quality Reviewer mid-July. Having made the changes she had recommended on her previous visit, she was very pleased with our progress and the visit was a success. Today 14 certificates from the OCN have arrived on my desk to be distributed to learners who have recently completed OCN modules successfully.

We’ve also recently been successful in a bid for some funding from Southampton City Council to work with service-users to create a website for the Council all about their Supporting People services. This is a very exciting new project, and since returning from a recent holiday I’ve been busily planning the first stages of delivery to start in October.

On another note, we’ve recently recruited a new intake of trainees on work-placement programmes. This is going very well, and our workshop and warehouse are looking all the better for the work that is being put in. The trainees seem to be enjoying their placements so far, and I can see the progress being made already.

Let’s hope the next month continues along the same lines!

We were invited to speak at Homeless Link’s conference this year (www.homeless.org.uk), and joined by two of our service users, Kasia and I travelled to Warwick in July to deliver.

During lunch, the service users that accompanied us took part in a ‘service user involvement’ event, which involved ‘networking’ the room to talk about the service we provide and how they have benefitted.

After lunch, Kasia and I delivered a presentation to delegates that covered how and why we set up, the services we offer and an overview of what it means to us to be a Social Enterprise.

I'm always up for talking about the work we do, and thoroughly enjoyed the day.

Photos of the day in the photo section.

There’s a new buzzword, or term that is being bounded around - the digital divide. This term is being used by the government and agencies to describe the gap between those people with effective access to digital and information technology, and those without access to it. It includes the imbalances in physical access to technology as well as the imbalances in resources and skills needed to effectively participate as a digital citizen. And there is new focus on closing this divide.

Assisting people to access IT who might not otherwise have been able to, has been one of our long-term goals. We have achieved this in two ways: through our computer suite and training department and also with our sales of refurbished computers. Although our sales room is open to all, our target market group for computer sales has actually been a mixture of low-income families and individuals, and students.

We have been successful in reaching low-income groups over the years we have been operating, but one question that comes up time and time again is:

‘Can I pay by instalments?’

And this creates an ethical dilemma. On the one hand, we want to make the buying process easy and accessible to the masses, but on the other hand we want to be responsible when it comes to money matters.

We specifically target individuals that don’t have a large disposable income, who may be challenged with a weekly struggle to make ends meet. The question is whether allowing ‘credit’ is helpful or whether this will have a compounding impact on the issues our customers may already be facing.

You might say that it should be down to the consumer to manage their own finances and in fact none of our business – but isn’t this the kind of culture that has led to the credit crunch?

If our customers can’t afford our products, when these are the audience we’re targeting, I’m in favour of reviewing the products and seeing what we can do about bringing the price down! And that’s exactly what we’ve done this month…

Due to a special offer we are running, our customers will now be able to buy a computer package for £30. It’s a basic package of hardware – base unit, monitor, keyboard & mouse, but it’s all tested and comes with a warranty. All that the customer has to do is source their own software and install it and with Open Source software freely available, this can be achieved for zero pence – we can even make a disk up if customers need one! We’re also looking at the possibility of providing cheap 1-2-1 sessions to our customers, to give them a quick overview of computer maintenance.

And this seems a far more ethical approach than offering credit.

We recently competed in the government backed Spark competition. As part of the application process senior managers at our organisation had to pitch a panel of experts with our business case. As part of that we made a video. Here it is...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWbcKh4TCVU

We were awarded a grant and paired with corporate partner, BT.

More on how this develops later...

Hello everyone!

My name is Ally and I am an IT Technician at Jamie's. I have decided to provide you guys with a insight into what happens during an average day at Jamie's. Right now we are in the process of rearranging our Workshop, which is proving to be a challenging process. By carrying this move as a team we hope to improve the efficiency of the workshop. Refurbishing computers on a mass scale can be a very time consuming process and as a team we found previously the layout of the workshop wasn't making the most of the potential available to us. We are currently about five days into the makeover. At first it was a bit daunting because moving furniture left the place looking like a war zone, but now as things have started to come together we can already see improvements both in team morale and efficiency of the place.

The challenge of the workshop move for myself, was having to fulfil other job commitments at the same time. At Jamie's I am the first point of contact for customer repairs and we are quite busy at the moment, which means I have had a lot of computers to repair, which involves sticking to tight deadlines to provide good customer support.

It has been a very positive experience working alongside our clients and Skills for Jobs candidates. I have been impressed with the amount of enthusiasm and hard work the guys have shown over these last few days. It is always a rewarding experience to see somebody who is initially lacking confidence and work experience, working within the team and enjoying themselves in the process. The workshop is beginning to look pretty darn good, and the infrastructure has improved, even if I must say so myself!

Once completed, I will be looking after volunteers on a day-to-day basis and helping them improve their IT and work skills by mentoring and instructing them through activities such as building computers, repairing computers and installing operating systems.

The future presents many challenges for Jamie's, but with the current enthusiasm and drive being shown, it should be a rather rewarding time for everyone here and I am happy to be a part of it.

First let me introduce myself– I’m Kasia, the Learning & Training Coordinator at Jamie’s. I’ve been on board since the start of Jamie’s, and it’s been a fantastic journey that’s still throwing great challenges and rewards our way. As Amanda mentioned in an earlier entry, we became accredited to deliver OCN (Open College Network) courses earlier in the year. This was a journey that I led and I feel very proud of the achievement.

So we’ve been delivering short OCN modules in Using the Internet and Digital Photography since May. Our learners have thoroughly enjoyed these courses, as evidenced by the evaluation feedback forms. It’s been a challenge for me and the training team though. We had our first Quality Review visit at the end of May, and although many of our initial procedures were satisfactory there was room for improvement. We’ve spent the last six weeks making these improvements, and the Quality Reviewer is visiting again this afternoon to check that this has been done. Although I feel confident that everything required is in place, I’m still feeling nervous and finding it difficult to concentrate on other work this morning. I shared my nerves with Amanda who suggested I write an entry here! So here I am, feeling a little like I’m about to go into an exam.

As Amanda mentioned earlier, our OCN courses have been tremendously successful with our learners, helping to build their confidence further and providing a great sense of achievement on completion. We’re hoping to expand the selection of courses on offer soon, and I’ll let you know how it goes…

It's on a day like today when I realise that we're achieving astonishing things with our clients. I arrived at work today to find that the project was open and the only 3 people in, half an hour before work started, were 3 of our beneficiaries - sat in the kitchen, drinking tea and planning for the day.

Now if I may just set the scene...

One of these guys has been through our housing projects, progressing from emergency access hostel to independent living flat. Whilst on this journey he has also been involved at Jamie's - he was in fact our fist volunteer. He has since worked up to being on a work placement, and on to become a permanent member of staff - one of our trainers no less. And today he has opened the project early - before any staff have arrived, and is eagerly planning the day ahead.

This is why we exist... to help others realise their potential through the provision of training opportunities to people who might otherwise have been written off by society.

And I very much like days like today!

We’re becoming a very environmentally aware society and many of us don’t want to see equipment that is still in working order, go to waste – we would prefer to see our computers ‘go to a good home’. This is evidenced by the huge response Jamie’s (www.jamies.org.uk) has had from the public over recent years, with thousands of individuals delivering their computers to us for re-use.

However, in April of this year due to new legislation and a subsequent rise in costs, we found ourselves having to make a decision on whether we could continue to provide this free service to the public. The answer was no, we couldn’t. However being aware of how important the service was to the city, we didn’t want to withdraw it altogether so we instead introduced an admin charge. This meant that those who still wanted their equipment to get a chance at re-use as opposed to entering regular waste streams, could continue to use Jamie’s. And these customers still got the added value of knowing that data storage equipment would be wiped and handled securely.

Bringing the charges in was a nerve racking time, but it was soon very apparent that our community was behind us. We have continued to have just as many householders visiting the project and all have been happy to make a financial contribution too.

It’s this kind of attitude from the community at large that makes me think that perhaps the reduce, re-use, recycle message is being heard and acted upon. And today, 3 months on from when the charge was introduced, I shall smile every time I think about this today and the impact we are capable of

We’re on a Mission!

Jamie’s was originally set up to provide learning and training opportunities to socially excluded adults in Southampton, and this remains our core aim. Providing these opportunities has, in the past only been possible because we have been receiving funding for our activities. However, as a Social Enterprise we are thankfully now in a position that we are able to generate a proportion of the income needed to sustain the project through trading. This commercial activity in turn provides an arena for work based training and teamed with other opportunities make for a unique blend of activity at the project. Just the other day for example…

We had 4 learners attending an OCN Digital Photography session. It was a very proud moment for us, because until recently learners wishing to achieve accredited learning had to be signposted to other establishments such as colleges, but Jamie’s became approved as a delivery centre for OCN in May of this year. This achievement means that learners are provided with yet another opportunity at Jamie’s. In addition, on the same day we had had 4 ‘work placement’ staff working in different areas of the project – 1 in the computer refurbishment workshop, 1 in the warehouse, 1 on the fork truck loading a van for recycling, and a fourth teaching new learners!

It’s this kind of success that Jamie’s strives for, and it’s thanks to all our supporters – funders and customers choosing Jamie’s - that we can offer these opportunities.

So I joined this today and thought the best place to start would be with an introduction to me... and the organisation I work for, which is why I'm here really. I think the best way to do this would be to share a recent article I wrote for an online newspaper:

In 2002 I was made redundant from an insurance giant, much to my delight. To be perfectly honest I couldn’t think of anything worse than being stuck there pushing paper for all eternity, and being made redundant gave me the push I needed to head in another direction. Although I hadn’t at that point figured out which direction. Then I happened across an advert for The Society of St James (Southampton’s largest homelessness charity) in my local paper, and although I initially thought this would be a stop gap while I figured out my future, it wasn’t long before I realised that this was to become the challenging and rewarding career I was looking for!

Our enterprise provides a unique learning opportunity for the individuals we work with, which is our core reason for existing. Our funded learning suite is available for use by local homeless and vulnerably housed people, and our dynamic project hosts many work experience schemes. Over 500 learners have benefited to date, Programmes have extended to socially excluded youngsters and are available for local businesses.

Want to know more?
www.jamies.org.uk

Amanda Golding
Refurbishment Coordinator