Proofers, Grants and Bouncing Back after Covid19
As for every charity, the height of the Coronavirus pandemic and the national lockdown offered a host of unprecedented challenges that we needed to overcome to keep supporting the wonderful young people on our programmes.
From suddenly losing one of our major sources of income (our market sales make up 50% of our funds) to many of our Breadwinners and Risers lacking access to the laptops and internet essential to keep in contact, there were plenty of barriers to our programmes.
During this time, we received the London Community Response Fund (LCRF), which distributed over £22 million to organisations across London who desperately need support during this time. As grants make up a larger part of the other half of our funds (alongside donations) this was essential to allow us to keep serving our community.
What did we achieve?
With the LCRF available, we were able to continue to support all our beneficiaries. Our Risers were able to complete the 8-week training programme and we were able to keep on all our volunteer mentors.
When lockdown started, we adapted the programme so our Risers could complete it online, with group sessions, tasks and mentoring all delivered through online video meetings (along with the rest of the world!).
We also created our new programme – Proofers – so we could continue providing training and paid work for the people who were on our core Breadwinners programme. Our Breadwinners, since they could no longer run the stalls, switched to assisting in the running of our online bread delivery service as online sales representatives.
The grant was essential for this as it took quite a bit of work to completely redesign our core offering on very short notice, as well as purchasing laptops and other IT equipment for those who needed them.
Lastly, we also used the support from the Fund to run 10 community engagement events online to keep spirits up as well as keep in contact with and nurture our community during lockdown, which was an extremely isolating time for our Risers and Breadwinners, as it was for everyone.
We welcomed a total of 128 people to the sessions, included informative training to fun activities like cooking and singing. After an intense period of lockdown and lots of hard work and training, the fund also supported a Day Trip to Kent for the Proofers.
What did we learn?
Being part of an online space to keep updated and learn new things brought a sense of community when participants and volunteers felt most isolated and were adapting to the changes. As ever, community was central to Breadwinners.
The Proofers programme also made a huge impact to those that took part as they learnt a whole new set of skills. Interestingly, some of our Proofers also told us that the new programme directly led to them getting jobs this summer, as they developed the transferable IT skills that are so essential for today’s workplace.
This has been super useful for us as we have realised the importance of teaching our Breadwinners and Proofers technical skills as many roles require IT literacy as an essential skill. Going forwards, we want to keep including IT skills as a part of what we offer to young people, as they have been so essential for the next steps in their careers.
One Proofer said that the training he had taken part in with Breadwinners was more than what he learnt at college, and another mentioned in an interview that Breadwinners was the only charity that really remained there for her over the coronavirus lockdown, when many others were unable to run their services.
We are also continuing to place wellbeing and mental health at the centre of Breadwinners, as we always have, to make sure the young people we support keep getting the support they need and deserve to thrive in the UK, even once things return to “normal” – whatever that is!