We pride ourselves on our relationships and partnerships with other brilliant organisations. Working together with others has been key to our success in providing a variety of training opportunities for our participants living in Rhondda Cynon Taff, especially this June.

Working with Drive

We have  been working closely with Drive, a supported living provider based around Aberdare to begin the sign-up process for Take Charge with their service users. Nine eager participants who are supported by Drive have signed up to Take Charge. We are hoping to sign up more in the near future. Our newest participants have been working with their support workers and Innovate Trust to provide a tailored programme of sessions. These sessions aim to improve participants’ work skills and wellbeing.

Our Take Charge project has the resources and the flexibility to provide these wellbeing-based sessions. Many of our participants are interested in improving their confidence, understanding anxiety and conflict resolution. Focusing on these important topics helps our participants to better understand themselves and others. Ultimately it helps them to work effectively as a team which is a key skill employers look for.

RCT Meet and Greet

Our team, alongside our partners at Skills and Volunteering Cymru (SVC), attended Innovate Trust’s Rhondda Cynon Taff Meet and Greet event this June. It was lovely to see so many people come together after the turbulent couple of years we’ve experienced. We benefited from listening to their ideas on what activities they want to do and what they want to achieve. Through this event, we were able to target new service users who showed an interest in attending some courses and trying volunteering. We are in the process of contacting their supported living managers to start the sign-up process. Working closely with service users’ support staff means we get to know our new participants quickly and can tailor our time with them.

Healthy Eating Week with SVC

We teamed up with SVC to provide a wide array of sessions and activities for The British Nutrition Foundation’s 10th Healthy Eating Week. We have planned two new healthy eating sessions, ‘Healthy Poo, Healthy You’. These sessions focused on maintaining a good fibre intake, and ‘What are you Drinking’, which focused on hydration.

Promoting healthy lifestyles helps our participants to feel better in themselves. Living a healthy life helps to reduce stress and enables us to learn new things more easily. This in turn enables us be a successful volunteer, something many of our participants strive to achieve.

More partnerships

Over the past few months, we have been working with Gadlys Learning Curve, Aberdare. We have provided a great deal of workplace training for their service users in the embroidery factory and the Cwm Cycling group at the Sobell Leisure Centre. The confidence these service users have gained through being on the Take Charge project is clear to see. We are now starting to move these participants on to volunteering. Gadlys now have two new Trash Busters, a new Fire Buddy and two new Pride Planners with a few new roles still to be decided!

We have loved working with these participants and are very proud of everything that they have achieved with us.