We’re proud to report some of the impacts we recently made locally, supporting people from all over the Lothians. We believe that technology can be a powerful catalyst for personal transformation in many different ways. Our work right here in Scotland is dedicated to empowering our local community through hands-on IT training. Last year we reached some significant milestones in supporting 124 members from our local community facing barriers to employment, poverty and providing wellbeing support. Together we provided 11,465 hours of community inclusion and training activities.
Our participants came from diverse backgrounds, including impacts from: poor mental health, autism, psychological trauma, bereavement or loss, learning to work in English as a second language, living in unstable accommodation and homelessness, living on low incomes and facing poverty, and long-term unemployment. We’ve also supported people from: the neurodiverse community, LGBTQ+ community, asylum seekers and refugees, a range of different faith communities, military veterans, carers, vulnerable groups, and people with additional support needs as well as people with disabilities. Through this programme we have been able to support our trainees to overcome some of life’s biggest challenges.
Through our monitoring and evaluation work we’ve seen several important outcomes in regard to employability for participants of our work over the last year.
- 4,242 hours of training activities led to:
- 76% graduating with a work-related qualification
- 82% showed improvements in measured competencies including: job searching skills, team working and collaboration, communication skills, CV and cover letter drafting abilities, interview and presentation techniques, problem solving skills, confidence and self-efficacy.
- 89% moved onto positive destinations within 3 months of completing our training programme, of which:
- 22% moved into skilled employment within 3 months of completing our training programme
- 39% moved into further education and are now on the path towards accredited qualifications
- 92% job retention at 6 months into post-training employment
- 84% job retention at 12 months into post-training employment
- 88% reporting satisfaction with post-training employment role alignment with career goals
In the longer-term, including trainees from previous years as our data set continues to grow, we have now seen 37% of participants moving into employment within 12 months of completing our training programme. Furthermore, we were very pleased to see that 113 of our trainees had transitioned off work-related benefits into sustainable employment – demonstrating the long-term impact of what our programme is achieving.
Running alongside our Local Empowerment Programme our wider Community Programme recorded substantial wellbeing improvements. In particular this year we are proud to have been able to develop our early intervention support to include suicide prevention. One particular success this year was in our community befriending activities. Through this initiative we brought dozens of individuals together in a low-pressure environment to bond over IT challenges and kindle new friendships. We received tremendous feedback from our community about how the group workshops brought a new friendly dynamic to the IT refurbishment especially when the groups celebrated the impacts made later on in the evening social events.
- 7,223 hours of community inclusion and befriending activities led to the following outcomes for our participants:
- 91% reported an increase in feeling connected to the people and places in their community and an increase in their personal social network and support system
- 84% reported an increase in their confidence, self-esteem and self-efficacy
- 76% reported an increase to their mental and emotional wellbeing
- 96% reported that they had gained skills and/or accreditation in computer refurbishment
Environmental Impacts
A core part of all our work is making sure we do the most we can to address the climate emergency. Therefore, we’re proud to report that by including 644 new households in our projects to protect our environment we have been able to save 107 tonnes of IT hardware from waste. This led to saving 2,200 tonnes of CO2 emissions through hardware reuse. Furthermore, we worked with 224 organisations and 540 employees to further education people on the intersection of sustainability and social inequity.
