Social Economy Fund

Supporting social enterprises to recruit people who have been long-term unemployment and providing in-work mentoring and training for these employees.

Belfast Citizenship Education Programme

Recruiting local people onto and supporting them through Citizenship training which leads to OCN Level 2 Qualifications.

Networking at Community and Strategic Level

We place a huge emphasis on networking within the community sector in West Belfast as local groups have local expertise and knowledge on the barriers being faced by those furthest form the labour market people and through their established networks they can help us access those who need the most help. While our office is at the Top of the Rock Centre we are committed to providing maximum access to our service through our outreach clinics throughout West Belfast. This enables us to take our service directly to local people.

We have developed effective working relationships and where appropriate referral mechanisms with a broad range of organisations that refer people to us who would benefit from our service. We also offer workshops and awareness raising sessions for people from organisations and support for staff working with unemployed people. Many of the organisations we work with do not have the resources to deal with the employability issues of the local community and we can ensure that these are addressed at a local level.

As a key recommendation of the West Belfast & Greater Shankill Taskforces we are an integral part of the employability strategy for West Belfast managed through the Employment Services Board. This ensures our service links into policy agendas locally, regionally and internationally. Through the structures within West Belfast managed through the Employment Services Board we are also strategically and operationally linked to a number of major employer initiatives within West Belfast, including:

• West Belfast & Greater Shankill Employers Forum which is funded by Bombardier, managed by Business in the Community and has access to hundreds of key employers from major retailers to construction contractors, IT and Engineering firms to banks and contact centres.
• The Health Employment Partnership, a unique partnership with the Belfast Health & Social Care Trust, Unison and community representatives which enables long-term unemployed access jobs within the Health Sector as well as providing training and support to those working in the Belfast Trust to have access to promotion opportunities.

We are highly successful in working with employers and can demonstrate our ability to secure employer support.

A fundamental aim of Job Assist Centres West Belfast is to bridge the gap between long-term unemployment and work. We achieve this by using a comprehensive approach which assesses peoples’ needs and wishes, in the context of employers’ requirements, attitudes and recruitment needs. This is consolidated by our community-friendly access to a comprehensive range of opportunities and services which assist long-term unemployed people to gain the necessary skills to be successful in finding and keeping work. This in turn is backed up by our ability to engage people to the service, assess their needs, provide employment mentoring and ultimately match them to jobs.

We build relationships with employers, to identify their labour force needs, understand their ethos and recruitment procedures and were necessary; we encourage them to change recruitment and employment procedures where such are seen to be barriers to obtaining and retaining suitable employees.

We bring in-depth knowledge of the local organisational infrastructure in West Belfast and excellent networking links with practical inter-organisational referral arrangements which we believe are key to ensure that people using our service have the optimum support to enable them to work with us to meet their employment goals whilst availing of other specialist support, which may or may not form part of their individual action plan.