ESOL teacher Debra Hill had a better idea for supporting her students to learn English, helping them move from basic questions to meaningful conversations with her fellow residents in St Helens.
Debra was working with refugees – mainly from Syria and Iraq – at a St Helens-based adult learning provider. “The learners I was working with are so nice – they’re really lovely families. But there was so much bureaucracy around helping them integrate and it was almost impossible to help asylum seekers. I was teaching sessions for vulnerable adults, but prioritising learning English was often a struggle: some couldn’t read or write in their own language; some could be moved on with no advance notice and for others, when you’re living on £5 a day, a bus pass that costs £4.60 isn’t always high priority.
“Then, once they’ve had their asylum claim heard, and are given refugee status, they have 28 days to find somewhere to live, get a National Insurance number and find a job. I had to find some way of bridging that gap, and helping them develop employability skills.”
Having worked through a few ideas to support her learners, Debra settled on the idea of a café, to help them develop customer service and employability skills, and use their hospitality and cooking skills to build their confidence. Café Laziz opened in September 2019 and in 22 weeks, has served 620 paying customers, providing 51 children and 82 asylum seekers with free meals.
“It was a question of looking at the skills we already had,” she says, “and how can we use them in this country.”
Taking on the café at a local children’s centre, she worked with learners to develop their customer service skills, and opened one afternoon a week, serving food for the local community. It also has a pay-it-forward mechanism to allow people to pay for someone else’s food, and children eat for free.
“Until recently, St Helens’ population was 97% white British. With refugees arriving in the town, I was concerned that they were being spread around different places, with no focal point to support them,” says Debra.
She worked with her team of volunteers on the design for the café’s logo, which saw it named Café Laziz – in English, the name translates to ‘delicious’. They voted on the design, did some work on their customer service skills, and opened.
“At first, I really struggled to get volunteers to be the cashier and talk to customers about their food,” she says. “But in no time at all their confidence really grew and they’re happy to chat and talk about themselves and their experiences.” Hearing those stories resonated with local residents: “I knew we were on to something when people stopped buying the jacket potatoes, because they were eating Arabic food instead,” she smiles.
There are also cultural differences to overcome. The first time the café opened, the women brought their children to work; now the dads look after the children while the women are working. But the dads have had a taste of life in the kitchen too – they made and served food for their wives and children at the Christmas party.
Debra has been working with the Kindred team since April this year, when we first went into lockdown. ”I’m so grateful to have found Kindred – they have been so helpful and supportive without even being asked,” she says. “They engage with and listen to socially-trading organisations through their ‘conversation’ sessions and work out ways to best help. The workshops offer really useful practical solutions to help socially-trading organisations improve their practices. We’re so lucky within Liverpool City Region to have access to such a great support network – all socially-trading organisations should take advantage of it.”
Debra’s aim is to get her volunteers – who often have low levels of spoken English – to gain more qualifications; they’ve all now achieved Level 2 allergen awareness and food safety certificates, and are working on a customer service City and Guilds qualification. Longer term, she plans to take on a venue where they can meet and train them up as managers, so that the café has more flexibility around its opening hours. “I want them to have something they can take ownership of,” she says.
One of the café’s first volunteers has already found full-time paid work in the food industry, and nine volunteers are engaged currently. One volunteer delivered an impromptu speech at a council grant launch event, whilst another has delivered Arabic drinks and snacks at a regional ESOL conference.
“For some of these women, it’s their dream,” says Debra. “Their education was disrupted in Syria or Iraq before the war, and they’ve had a lot of time since just waiting in Lebanon or Jordan, sometimes in refugee camps. Not having those skills or experience takes a hit on their confidence. This is a direct way we can change that.”
Merseyside Somali Community and Association (MSCA) has been distributing fresh, hot meals to around 100 people every week during lockdown, from its kitchens on Granby Street.
Meals are delivered to the elderly, disabled and those who can’t cook for themselves within the local community, focusing on those without other support. They’re delivered alongside a socially-distanced chat, and play an essential part in making sure community members don’t become isolated, particularly when visiting people who can’t leave their homes because they’re at risk, or have a disability.
These conversations have become a crucial lifeline for community members. While many – but not all recipients – are from the Somali community, a number of languages are spoken and some speak very little English. For the team it’s an opportunity to ask what else might be needed, from a pint of milk, clarification of the latest guidelines, ordering medication or contacting family.
Saeed Ibrahim is a former housing officer who’s part of the team. He’s “never seen such an inspiring project,” he says. “It feels especially important to get and run the service when they don’t speak English.”
Referrals from housing associations and shelters for elderly people have formed the core of the service, with a combination of funding from the Steve Morgan Foundation, Martin Lewis Foundation, Liverpool City Region CA and Princes Park Council Fund support its growth. “MSCA received and managed the grants, but we have a partnership for delivery with Liverpool Somali Community Centre,” says Saeed.
A group of seafarers set up Liverpool’s Somali community centre in 1978, seeing a growth in community numbers in the 1980s, when war broke out in Somalia. It’s evolved from being a focal point for the community and somewhere to meet – in pre-mobile phone times – to an established organisation providing subsidised Somali and Yemeni food for the local community, with a strong social aspect.
The centre also provide educational activities, employability advice and immigration support in partnership with Liverpool Law Clinic. The centre’s youth service provides additional community support, alongside NHS, Mersey Care and mental health services and awareness sessions on giving up smoking, cancer awareness, diabetes, autism, ADHD and mental health, enabling people to recognise issues and seek support.
“We have recently established a collaboration with Liverpool Somali Community Centre,” says Saeed, “delivering and preparing meals for the elderly people and people with underlying medical conditions. We have an agreement to use their kitchen space, so we can deliver the meals together in these difficult times. Our overall aim is to be self financing as an organisation and our vision for the future includes developing projects that meet the needs of people in our community such as education and training, care provision and transport.”
We need to think about music differently; as a transformative opportunity,” says Future Yard founder Craig Pennington. “There’s not a single music venue dedicated to celebrating new music in Wirral. For a place with music in its DNA, this is a saddening truth and a missed opportunity. Our town is scarred from decades of economic decay. The latest Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) ranked Birkenhead in the bottom 0.3% of electoral wards in England. We need to think about music differently. Birkenhead needs it.”
Its 2019 Future Yard Festival piloted the team’s plan, testing the idea with a weekend-long festival which created a financial impact of £282,191, about which 97% of visitors expressed a wish to attend more events like Future Yard. It’s now following up with a community music venue and skills hub, that will create a permanent home to realise its vision, focusing not just on live music, but industry skills and artistic development.
A new space at 75 Argyle Street in Birkenhead will become a community music venue run by the CIC, providing industry-led training pathways into the live sector for local young people. 10,000 sq ft of space will create a 350 capacity live venue, 11 music studios, a workspace and café/bar.
For Birkenhead, it’s an opportunity to showcase internationally-significant artists, diversify the town’s night-time economy, create sustainable, high quality careers for local people and incubate and accelerate new music industry start-ups.
For young people in the area, its training programmes are accredited with Arts Award (Ofqual, Trinity College); an apprenticeships and FE offer is being developed with partners and undergraduate and post-graduate placements with the University of Liverpool will begin in January 2021.
Kindred has supported the Future Yard team with several successful funding applications and continues to champion the opening of the new venue. Future Yard is fast-becoming hugely important to the Wirral’s eco-system and the renaissance in and around Birkenhead and Hamilton Square.
Homegrown Collective is a social business established in 2019, by a group of Liverpool women brewers and horticulturalists. They began by growing hops on community green spaces and in neighbours’ gardens and yards in North Liverpool, bringing people together to harvest and brew. Now they’re looking to develop a collective of community-owned training microbreweries in North Liverpool.
Homegrown Collective was launched with support from Power to Change and its Bright Ideas programme and is now part of the Power to Change-backed School for Social Entrepreneurs Scale-Up programme.
Homegrown Collective will launch its first community brewery – the Homegrown Regents Street Brewery – within Make’s North Dock building in October 2020. This ‘nano brewery’ will help it develop innovative models of localised manufacturing, creating a financially-viable business that sells beer locally, nationally and internationally – and will also pilot a sensory technology to measure its carbon impact. A second and larger-scale brewery will be launched at the end of 2021 in Anfield. This ‘Anfield’s Homegrown Brewery’ is part of the Homebaked Community Land Trust’s Oakfield Road development.
Homegrown Collective’s ‘beers with benefits’ programme helps support women in their neighbourhoods to become ‘brewsters’ (female brewers) by creating jobs in the male- dominated brewing industry. It supports them into the industry via training , mentoring and creating safe online social spaces for women to learn, share and experience beer. It trains local unemployed residents in horticulture and brewing to support them back to work and tackles endemic isolation within their communities, by running growers and brewers clubs to bring together horticulturalists and home brewers.
“Kindred has amazed me; when the chips were down they stepped up.” Says co-founder, Sam Jones. “We all have our pandemic stories, but my own is that when my father was seriously ill, Nic from Kindred worked with me late into many nights (and even over her weekend) to help me pull together a critical funding bid for the business.
“Kindred having our back spurred me and our local directors on. With a local connection via Kindred, we’re now supplying our first beer in Anfield and North Liverpool in partnership with Bernie Mays (Glebe Hotel) – and we’re about to launch our nano brewery, online shop and virtual learning programme.”
Liverpool-based Peloton’s aim is to make bikes social, accessible and inclusive. It uses a range of cycles to give people inclusive experiences and transferable skills. “We see it as an opportunity to work with people whatever they bring,” says founder Danny Robinson, “from abilities and disabilities to dreams and ambitions – we start from there.” Danny describes it as “person-centred practice,” using his background as a trained therapist to create a range of projects to improve accessibility.
Cycling Without Age sees older riders tour the city’s parks on a trike, while former projects have equipped young people in the criminal justice system with skills, training and confidence; Molly Coddle supports mums to ride safely with their children, promoting bikes as a sustainable and safe form of family transport. Peloton’s BMX track in Everton Park focuses on young people between the ages of seven and 11, working through practical skills and pastoral care, from making friends and improving confidence to BMX skills, mechanics, and track building.
At Cycling Without Age, trike volunteers are recruited at the university, where Peloton runs a shop. “Yes, it allows older people to get out and about on a trike,” says Danny. “But it’s also introducing younger people to what it is to offer care and support in a really intimate way. They both feel good. It has huge impact.”
Peloton’s Agile delivery service has pioneered last-mile deliveries across the city, offering a sustainable and cost effective alternative to expensive last-mile delivery drops. Working with other STOs including Greens for Good, Kitty’s Launderette, News from Nowhere and Windmill Co-op, Danny says demand has risen from around ten hours a week, pre-pandemic, to 50 a week now.
“We don’t rely on grant funding,” says Danny, “so it’s vital that we have commercial services that bring money in. We think that people should choose us – businesses should choose to buy a bike from us – because of the things we do.” Alongside Agile, Peloton also runs a bike shop to provide traded income that helps support its accessibility projects; it ran a mobile service throughout lockdown keeping key workers and their bikes on the road.
Peloton is now working with Kindred to develop Agile, categorising skills and jobs into four areas: riding, maintenance, design and tech. “Kindred’s worked with us on a bid to the Innovation Fund for a training manager, which will enable us to recruit and train four apprentices, learning each element in turn,” says Danny.
“For me, social enterprise is more than work: ideas percolate from everyday life and we toy with these ideas all the time – that’s where the value of collaboration is at its optimum.”
Peloton has also supported members of the Kindred community with a fortnightly bike auction. By donating a bike for Kindred to auction, it’s supported STOs that have experienced hardship during lockdown, including, so far, Therapeutic Garden, a new Positive Futures children’s home and refugee and asylum seeker support hub Cafe Laziz.
“We’re at our best when we’re collaborating,” he says. “Our shop at the Guild of Students developed from sharing our knowledge of wellbeing and theirs of the student experience and coming together over a three-year period to get the offer right for everyone. It helps if you have similar values or products, but collaboration can be found all over the place. It can be for a little or a long time; forever or a week. It’s in the contact and purpose that we learn exponentially.”
Sew Halton is a social enterprise that utilises machine sewing and clothing design as a platform to reduce unemployment, isolation, poor wellbeing and fabric waste.
Before Covid-19, the team ran a range of activities from its sewing studio at Runcorn Old Police Station. These included a confidence sewing course aimed at long-term unemployed people, an up-cycling project that distributed over 500 coats to local children and a poppy-making project with local veterans.
Sew Halton’s participants typically face many barriers – in a recent series of courses, 26% of the participants had a mental health challenge and 64% had a physical disability of some kind. Halton as a borough faces many challenges: high levels of deprivation have been compounded by years of austerity and many people feel isolated and disconnected. Covid-19 added another level of complexity to these social challenges.
The Kindred team has worked with Sew Halton since early lockdown. “Kindred’s support has been vital to Sew Halton – lockdown and social distancing could easily have made us unsustainable,” says founder Victoria Begg. “With their support we’ve been able to offer a range of Zoom sewing classes, aimed at those that may be particularly at risk of isolation. These have included craft lessons for young carers, sewing classes for local veterans, making masks for local charities and scrubs for our NHS heroes. Lockdown became a very productive time for Sew Halton and our community of sewers.”
Now, Sew Halton’s moving into the area of manufacture. It plans to set up a factory that employs local people and produces good ethical products from its base in Halton, which is plans to call ‘social manufacturing’. “Kindred has been incredible in helping us take this vision forward,” says Victoria. “They have connected us to universities, other manufactures and fellow social businesses. The networking and capacity-building they have given us has been fantastic. We’re now confident that we can start to manufacture a range of eco-sanitary garments in the near future.”
Its work in the community has also gained new recognition. “Sew Halton has been a great help to some of our most isolated veterans and families during lockdown,” says Billy Jones, director of the Veterans Community Force in Halton. “The craft sessions and sewing are great, but it’s the connection and community they’ve developed that really makes a difference.”
Leigh Thompson is the chief commissioner for NHS Halton CCG. “It’s been amazing to see the organisation grow and to see the positive impact that Sew Halton has had on the participants’ health and wellbeing,” she says. “During lockdown, Sew Halton and an army of local volunteers, manufactured scrubs for frontline workers. This was a brilliant idea that brought people together with a clear sense of community and purpose.”
“Sew Halton is a unique and valued community organisation that’s helping those that often fall through the cracks. They have created a brilliant community of sewers, crafters and friends – isolation has met its match in Halton!” adds Cllr. Margaret Horrabin, Mayor of Halton.
