Aim

We take young people to work on jobs in the community, building their confidence and giving them skills for a fulfilling future in trades

• Trades4Care (Www.trades4care.co.uk) was founded in 2018 and incorporated as a Community Interest Company in February 2019.  
• Our aim is to help young people, especially those from a disadvantaged background, to gain life skills and work experience and connect them with their community in ways which will build their confidence, show them the pleasures of work and the value of education, and perhaps lead them into fulfilling careers in trades.  
•  Our approach is to work with small numbers of young people at a time on professional jobs in care and community premises, to give each individual the particular support they need and to stay beside them until they have found a safe step into further training or employment.  We have developed a 12 day programme to boost confidence and understand the attractions of work, to prepare for working in a commercial situation, and to join tradespeople on a real job as one of a professional team.  
  
  
• After the programme, we continue to support young people with advice, training, mentoring, and further work placements. The three directors, Andrew Coxon, Charlie Wright and Deborah Jenkins, believe that some young people particularly benefit from supportive role models to build their confidence and that there is a huge untapped resource of experienced tradespeople prepared to help. A high percentage of skilled tradespeople are aged over 50, and there is a national recognition of the need to prepare more young people to take their place as they retire, so there is a good chance that we can get young people into employment if we can address the issues that are holding them back.
• We work mainly in community and care premises, taking every opportunity to connect the young people working  with the owners and residents or users of the place, and to make sure that they understand how it fits into the community.  We’ve done work in hospices, care homes, community centres, schools and heritage projects. 
• To date we have run 8 programmes and worked with around 40 young people, all of whom have moved into further training or employment.  We want to work with many more young people, first around where we live, and then moving further afield.

Some of the young people need a lot more support than others to find the confidence to get on the next rung of the ladder.   We are trying to build a bursary fund so that we can offer the chance for some of them to act as youth mentors on the programmes while working more intensively with our team.  We have piloted this, and the first young man who has had a bursary is well on the way to securing full time work.  

Every pound you can give us will go to help individuals onto a road to success!!!!

• £10  pays for a T4C shirt for a programme participant
• £150 pays for an additional week’s work experience for a ‘graduate’ of the T4C programme, £100 of which is paid to the young person as a reward for work
• £250 pays for a week of a bursary to help a young person towards full time work, with £200 going straight to the young person.  

To see more about us and hear from two of our trainees and one of our partners click this link:

httpsConnor and Mason Video://trades4care.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Trades4Care.mp4

This project successfully funded on 29th March 2021