City Gateway
City Gateway is a charity based in East London, offering support, employment and apprenticeship opportunities for young people, women and families.
The Skill Up. Switch On. project will embed digital skills across City Gateway’s core programme using a flexible approach to enable all learners to build their digital confidence. Through Power Up 2.0, City Gateway plans to upskill its staff team who work directly with beneficiaries right from the start of their learning journey, through to post-progression support teams. This will ensure beneficiaries are holistically and consistently encouraged to apply digital skills across their individual learning and bespoke coaching plan within a safe and supported environment.
In conversation with City Gateway
What inspired you to apply for Power Up funding?
In the wake of the pandemic, digital skills have become more important than ever. Our young people were already the most likely to be digitally excluded, and this now has even more significant impacts on their prospects. Power Up has given us a brilliant opportunity to trial new ways of working, and to become an organisation that embeds digital skills throughout so that no young person needs to be held back from securing their dream job.
What does the funding mean to your organisation?
We want all young people to have an equal chance to reach their full potential – and Power Up will help us make this a reality for the young people we support. This funding from Good Things Foundation means that we can innovate within our digital skills provision, ensuring it is tailored to the needs and barriers of our demographic and scale it up to support more young people to help them reach their career ambitions.
How do you hope your project will help your local community?
Tower Hamlets, where we are based, has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, and only 15% of local jobs are held by residents. This mismatch is largely caused by lack of skills and experience amongst candidates, coupled with a lack of awareness of careers and pathways to work. This grant will enable us to significantly enhance our benchmark, beating education and employability programmes, addressing one of the most crucial local skills gaps, so that we can grow our impact for young people locally.
What’s the main thing you would like to get out of your involvement in the Power Up programme?
By getting involved in the Power Up programme, we’re hoping to create change, not just for our learners and our local communities, but also nationally. We want to do this by working with others to share successes, lessons learned and evidence-based models for replication.