What is the vision of your Organisation?
Learning has the power to transform lives. We pioneer and manage many successful educational projects including schools catch up programmes, a social enterprise which provides alternative learning programmes for young people, and employment and skills hubs.
Why has your Organisation signed the ‘End Poverty Pledge’?
We are committed to supporting people in need and value the importance of local communities working together to alleviate poverty. Our over-arching mission is to provide learning and help people reach their potential. This initiative will assist in improving our services, coordination, and partnership work.
What examples can you give of your Organisation putting the ‘End Poverty Pledge’ into practice?
Our organisation’s strategy includes the aim of preventing or alleviating poverty, and the effects of poverty because our purpose is to empower people through learning to have a better life outcome.
We are a registered Living Wage Employer.
We are part of a wider network of organisations that is working together to tackle poverty in Surrey, such as by attending the Advice cafes.
We have a positive approach to supporting service users that focuses on people’s strengths, not their needs or problems. During our 1-2-1 meetings, we concentrate on strengths and transferable skills. We offer coaching techniques to highlight positive elements.
We ensure that our service is accessible to everyone, regardless of their financial circumstances. We offer outreach services including attending the Advice café, North Leatherhead/Harvest Community Church and Goodwyn’s estate, as well as attending community events in Box Hill, Mole Valley Hub and Dorking.
We have effective systems in place to refer or signpost people to additional support, if they need it, such as through the advice café and other networks. We are also part of the ReferSurrey project which will help this further.
What would you hope to be able to do more of in the longer term?
We will be inviting Good Company to deliver Poverty Awareness Training to all our staff in 2026 to make them aware of the challenges facing people in financial hardship and how to minimise these.
We will continue to improve our signposting for people to additional support through the ReferSurrey project.
We would like to involve people with lived experience of poverty in providing feedback on our services and helping to shape future policies and services. We are planning to run a focus group in March 2026 to start this work.