The New Cross Gate Trust

THE NEW CROSS GATE TRUST

Delivery Plan 2016/17

1Introduction

The New Cross Gate Trust is a social regeneration charity working to support the people of New Cross Gateto achieve their full potential.The Trust works with local people and organisations to improve people’s lives and life chances throughexpanding opportunities for education, employment and health. Besson Street Community Garden is the home of the Trust. This beautiful community garden provides a fantastic environment from which we deliver a significant proportion of our educational, health and employment focused activities, and provides an important community hub.

This delivery plan sets out what the New Cross Gate Trust plans to deliver over 2016/17.

2Vision and mission

Our Vision is that New Cross Gate should be a place where people are able to live happy, healthy, stable and fulfilled lives.

Our Mission: We will work for the benefit of the people of New Cross Gate and the surrounding area to:

• Raise educational achievement, build aspirations, develop skills and promote training and development
• Support local people towards and into employment opportunities.
• Improve health and well-being and support healthy life-styles.
• We will also work with other local organisations who share our vision, to develop our joint capacity, sustainability and quality of service, and through this build a stronger local community.

In pursuing these aims we will also have regard to the importance of community safety, access to services, quality housing and a high quality physical environment.

We aim to deliver our mission through a combination of projects delivered direct from our base in Besson Street Community Gardens, and through commissioning and supporting other local providers as appropriate.

3Delivery

Objective 1: Raise educational achievement, develop skills and promote training and development

NXG Trust aims to offer a diverse programme of learning and educational opportunities, targeted at all ages. We recognise and encourage the importance of learning for learning’s sake, and see our role predominately as a ‘first rung’ provider, engaging local residents in taking the first steps back into learning and training, building their confidence and encouraging them to work towards achieving their learning, training and career goals. For young people, our focus is on building confidence and a life long love of learning.

There are four strands to our educational provision:

1)Under fives and families

2)School age provision

3)Family and recreational learning

4)Adult learning and training (mainly covered in our employment strand)

Under fives and families

We will continue to deliver three under 5s stay and play sessions per week during term time. These sessions support the early years foundation stage andinclude activities such as story telling, learning words and letters, singing and music, craft and art, growing, building, sand and water play, use of balance bikes and other play equipment, gardening and getting dirty. All of these activities provide support for children to develop their motor skills, communication skills, self-confidence, independence and the bond with their parent or carer. Sessions also provide an important social network for parents in the early years of parenting, and our stay and play staff deliver a vital role in signposting those who need it to other local support services.

School age provision

We will continue to offer a term time environmental curriculum to local primary schools. This provides a 3-hour session each week (schools will normally book in for a programme of 10 weeks), and covers topics from bees to food growing, pond life, trees and plants in the urban environment, how to reduce, reuse recycle, and small creatures in the urban environment, all making use of the fabulous resources that Besson Street Community Garden provides.

We will deliver our annual ‘Wildly Fun’ Summer Theatre School, targeted at 7-13 year olds. This theatre school builds participants’ skills in music, dancing, singing, drama, costume and set design, as well as their soft skills such as self-confidence, presentation skills, co-operation and team working. It takes place over a 2-3 week period in the summer, with a performance for family and friends on the final day. Not only do the students benefit from something educational and exciting over the summer (many of whom would not normally get a summer holiday away from home), but the parents also benefit from an incredibly affordable and safe activity which provides much needed childcare cover over the summer break.

We will run a Tuesday evening recorder club for young people, enabling participants to learn an instrument and how to read music.

We will commission a variety of additional youth projects during the summer holidays, to be delivered by other local charities and organisations through our summer youth activity grants scheme. Youth activitiesfunded under this strand will be expected to have a strong focus on education and health outcomes.

We will support Somerville Youth and Play Provision to deliveradditional educational activities from its new premises. Initially, we are in the process of submitting, with them, various joint funding bids to secure a careers advisor and or IT skills trainer to maximise the value of the IT suite which we have supported them to fund in 2015/16. We would like to see a variety of careers advice support and IT training available to the young people who make use of Somerville. The bids will include some elements of match funding from the trust to support this aim.

We will also work with GCDA to identify opportunities for deliveringhealthy eating cooking sessions for Somerville’s young people. This will focus on teaching young people how to cook from scratch, as well as building an understanding of healthy cooking and eating.

Family, informal and recreational learning

We will continue to deliver family learning opportunities to our users, and to encourage learning for learning’s sake.

Through our community events in Besson Street we will offer various craft based, story-telling, and other educational family learning activities. This year we will deliver a literary event in September to celebrate the Centenary of Roahl Dahl, as well as the annual ‘Halloween Hoot’. These events will also be accompanied by a ‘Saturday second Hand stall’, music, and other fun, participatorycommunity activities.

We will deliver the sewing project ‘Sew you want to get out more’, part funded through NHS Lewisham’s Choose Health. This project not only builds participants’ sewing skills, but also providesa social space for local people to build networks, share skills, conversation, buildtheir confidence, and reduces isolation(therefore also providing positive outcomes on participants’ mental health). The programme includes visits from a range of health professionals to discuss in an informal way, aspects of health, including healthy eating, stopping smoking, and the importance of physical activity. The success of this scheme has resulted in us developing a second class, which will be funded via our Besson Street budget, and will take place on a Wednesday morning to accommodate the level of demand for this type of activity.

We will host weeklyopen access community gardening sessions, where local people can help in the garden in return for taking home a share of the produce, as well as the opportunity to make new friends, develop their gardening skills, find out about other activities, and keep fit and healthy through gardening.

We willdeliver bee-keeping courses, to both adults and young people. We will continue to offer this course during the year as part of our recreational learning offer.

Depending on the success of a current pilot, Clyde Children’s Centre staff will deliver a programme of support for local people who are experiencing challenges in ‘raising boys’.

We will continue over the course of the year to identify and deliver opportunities for local residents, young and old, to try out new activities and learn new skills, where funding permits.

Objective 2 – Support local people towards and into employment opportunities

Adult learning

We will continue to grow our offer as a training provider, engaging local people in taking their first steps back into learning and training, and working towards achieving their learning, training and employment goals.

Besson Street has a well-established reputation as a provider of high quality ‘first rung’ adult education. We will continue to deliver a wide range of courses to the local community. These will include:

- Food Health and Hygiene (level 2),
- First Aid at Work (level 3),

- Paediatric and Emergency First Aid (Level 3),
- Customer Service (level 2),
- Fire Warden Training, and
- a newly introduced package of courses centred around the care profession including, for example:Dementia Awareness, Challenging Behaviour Awareness training, Safeguarding of Vulnerable Adults, Medication Awareness, Infection Control training, Stroke Awareness Training, and Moving and Handling of People.

We will continue to offer ESOL (funded by the City Bridge Trust from September 2014 until 2017) 3 days per week, at a range of levels according to the needs of our clients, but focussed at basic and intermediate level.

Job search and advice services

Sadly, after funding this service for a number of years, 170 Community Project has decided to stop its delivery of jobsearch support services and homework club, which we have funded over the last four years.

To replace this provision in some form, we have commenced the funding of a weekly IT training session, coupled withsome basic jobsearchsupport, CV formatting and registering with jobsearch sites via New Cross Learning, each Wednesday 11.00am-2.00pm. We will aim to continue this in 2016/17 (New Cross Learning have already secured funding for part of the year via the local assembly, but we will match fund this to ensure that it can continue for the full year). The focus of this session will be on developing IT skills.

We will look to use any additional funds to support some complementary careers advice/employment skills support. We will also continue to look at the opportunity of delivering these services in other locations, such as via the local schools.

Advice

Through changes in welfare provision under the existing government, we have seen a considerable increase in the number of people seeking professional advice services. We will therefore fund a new part time member of staff at 170 Community Project who will be responsible for the management and coordination of the advice services that this organisation delivers. We expect that this will improve access and increase the capacity of this organisation to deliver advice services to local people, while also improving the management of the organisation as a whole. We will retain an oversight managerial role on this post.

Objective 3 – Improve health and well-being and support healthy life-styles

Health remains a significant challenge within New Cross Gate. However, already within the area there is significant local infrastructure, through the North Lewisham Plan and the Deptford and New Cross Choose Health participatory budgeting scheme.Through this, local groups have the opportunity to bid for funding to run health related activities. Nineteen activities have received funding from this programme for 2016. There is also (subject to future funding) a food stall (co-op) in operation and a physical activity coordinator (now Lewisham wide), as well as the development of a local health forum.

We will continue to work with other organisations who have a key emphasis on health, to look for ways in which we can maximise the use of their services in the local area, and identify additional partnership opportunities. These include:

-Community Connections (who have a Community Development worker now working in North Lewisham aimed at linking people in to existing services and volunteering opportunities),

-MYtimeactive – a social enterprise which delivers support for young people who are overweight / obese, through their Boost/MEND programmes. We will continue to facilitate their access to, and delivery from local schools, and to promote the services that they are able to offer to local people.

-GCDA – to commission health and nutrition services to be delivered within New Cross, through, in the first instance, Somerville Youth and Play Provision.

-The Choose Health partnership, to continue to support this partnership, and to identify additional opportunities to promote better community health.

-To support other local organisations and groups with space to deliver their activities (i.e. our self help mindfulness classes and self help depression group)as well as capacity building, fund holding or training as appropriate to improve their ability to deliver their activities.

We will also:

Provide support with marketing and communications, and host health related information on our website and via Facebook, newsletter and noticeboards.

We will work health related messages into all of our own activities.

Objective 4 - Community development and partnerships

The New Cross Gate Trust is only one of a number of charities operating within New Cross, many of whom share a similar vision to ourselves. We therefore aim to work closely with other local organisations to support them in developing their skills and organisational capacity and in delivering services that are in line with our own objectives. This will include:

Developing strong partnerships with our many stakeholders, and identifying opportunities for collaboration, both at local and borough level.

Providing supportto other local organisations to secure external funding: Identifying suitable funds, signposting partners to these, working with others to develop their funding applications, offering match funding or match funding in kind where possible, or developing partnership bids which encourage our organisations to work more closely together.

Providing a low cost community space for the delivery of community based activities (currently local groups who make regular use of our space include a self-help mindfulness group, a self-help depression group, and JOY).

Providing a capacity building fund. In this financial climate, securing funding for infrastructure as opposed to project funds is very difficult. We have put aside a small amount of funding that other local organisations can access to support their development. For example, this might fund staff training or consultancy support to develop and strengthen their organisation. Where possible, we will seek to encourage this funding to be used collaboratively, to build capacity across all our local organisations.

From time to time, we will deliver issue specific training which can be accessed by all the local organisations. We will continue to work with our partner organisations to identify shared training needs and to deliver courses on these issues. This will include working with VAL/CTDN to identify courses available, and either signposting others to them, or seeking bespoke provision.

We also provide a door to door, and social media based marketing and communication service. Our newsletter, which goes door to door within New Cross Gate, can host information about not only our own services, but also services provided by other local organisations. It can also be used for example, to help recruit new trustees, and to inform the community about pertinent issues or changes that are taking place within the local community. On our website we also host a community directory, and local demographic data to support funding bids and share information. We will continue to use Facebook to promote both our own and others activities to our users.

We will continue to build our awareness of wider policies and initiatives that exist nationally, to identify opportunities that may benefit New Cross Gate, and to communicate these to other groups.

Objective 5 - Besson Street development site

We will continue to work with the council to bring forward the development of the site on Besson Street. This is intended to provide a new surgery, replacing the Queens Road surgery (which will be owned by the Trust), and to provide some office space for the Trust. Progress has moved forwards in recent months, and the council now have Mayor and Cabinet agreement to appoint a development partner, with a view to submitting a planning application in summer of 2016, and with work starting on site in late 2016/early 2017. This will entail some expenditure from the Trust finances to employ a monitoring surveyor, to ensure that the plans drawn up and subsequent development meets the needs of the Trust and of the Queens Road Surgery. There will also be legal fees relating to the development and the assets that the Trust expects to receive from this development.

We will work closely with the council, with Queen’s Road Surgery, and with the local community, to ensure that this development moves forward in a way that is supported as far as possible by the local community. We will offer support to the council around communicating these changes and engaging the local community in responding to consultations on this development.