In 2023, through the Community Foundation, we secured £10,000 funding to pilot Own My Life Employability. The vision of this project was to develop a women-centred employability course, that could be delievered by domestic abuse services and other organisations. This would better serve women's employability needs (most such support is generic and therefore becomes default-male) and enable services to have an innovative and new way of working with women; thereby helping more women and potentially being able to access employability funding to resource this.
This video tells women what Own My Life Employability is about:
We were delighted that the project had a much greater take-up that we had anticipated. We trained fifty-two practitioners from forty organisations, with fifteen Employability courses pilotted across the UK. Participants said the following about the course:
We have learned so much through pilotting Own My Life Employability and hope to secure additional funding so that we can incorporate the feedback from participants and facilitators into the final course. We had five evaluation conclusions:
The high take up of Own My Life Employability indicates significant need and commitment to delivering a targeted employability course for women, via specialist women’s services.
Own My Life Employability made a positive difference to the majority of participants lives and provided opportunities for services to work with women in new and innovative ways.
Most participants and practitioners advocated for the material to be redeveloped to make Own My Life Employability effective.
There is a need for significant redevelopment of Own My Life Employability before it is ready to be formally rolled out. Funding will be required to make this possible.
We are so grateful to all the women who attended pilot courses, to the facilitators and their organisations who delivered the course, to the National Lottery Community Fund, and to Jo Costello who provided expert project management.
You can CLICK HERE to read the our Employability Evaluation Report.
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