This blog comes from one of our delivery providers for JobsPlus, a new community-led approach to help people find work and boost their earnings. JobsPlus is being piloted on 10 sites across England, following the model’s success in the United States.

The programme is led by Learning and Work Institute (L&W) with funding from Department for Work and Pensions and Youth Futures Foundation. At its heart are social landlords who bring together services delivered through on-site community hubs. The pilot sites offer employment support to all working-age residents, with no additional eligibility criteria. Early findings from the evaluation of JobsPlus indicate that it is effectively reaching people who face complex barriers to work and are typically underserved by mainstream employment services.

In this blog, Tracy shares how her team has embraced the ways that JobsPlus differs from typical employment services, how JobsPlus fills gaps in what existing support is provided and the positive impact it’s having in their community.

It’s two and a half years since we first started contemplating being part of the JobsPlus national pilots. What an opportunity! To take a proven US model, transport it to Toxteth, be part of a national effort supported by HM Treasury, funded by the Department for Work and Pensions and Youth Futures Foundation, a learning community, evaluations, and working alongside Plus Dane Housing, the social landlord. What’s not to love?

It is the simplicity of JobsPlus that makes it make sense to anyone we meet, from the Combined Authority, housing, the local GP, Council and each person we support. Our remit simply is to help anyone, regardless of their characteristics, circumstances, employment status, benefit claim, or anything else… all of which usually determine what support someone is entitled to. At Transform Lives Company, we see the impact of this complexity all the time, often stuck in this funding nightmare that’s impossible to explain to someone who just wants help. The non-reliance on system-referrals sets JobsPlus apart from most other employment programmes.

In JobsPlus all we need to know is where someone lives –  our offer is universal for everyone in the neighbourhood. Unlike almost everything else, we help people who have a job already, but maybe that job is temporary or insecure, not enough hours or pay.  We help people who have never had a job, a young person who doesn’t know where to start, or someone who is newly settled in our neighbourhood. Listening to people, taking more time, being flexible, agile, versatile, outward facing, and having a place we can welcome people into with no agenda, sometimes just for tea and toast… it all matters.

At first, our thinking around Community Champions, one of the key planks of JobsPlus felt clunky, like we were trying to make community organising fit into an employment programme. What are we asking people to ‘champion’? Why would they? What’s in it for them? In time, we saw how local people who now trusted us because they had benefited, started to bring in their family members, neighbours and friends and it all started to grow into something dynamic and meaningful, which we wouldn’t be without now. Nine Champions have brought in more than 30 new people, which would have taken one of our staff months to achieve.

We are engagement heavy. We spend a lot of time thinking about how to meet more people, whether this is parents, young people, people experiencing health and wellbeing problems, or people who don’t speak fluent English, or enough to get a job. They all need something different, and they will respond to different messages or the way the message is delivered.

We’ve become bolder in how we share what we do. One teammate even booked a haircut just to chat with the local hairdresser, because who knows the community better? Booking an ice cream van for an afternoon brought 120 people on a sunny day, and six are now engaging with us because of that one event. Growing our network of trusted local voices spreads the word far better than a “get a job” poster ever could and reaches those that standard promotion does not.

To date we have supported 32 people into a job

This all matters, because we know that disabled people who live in social housing are eight times more likely to be out of work, four times more likely if they are not disabled, and likely to be earning half the wages of people in other types of housing, so in lower pay overall. And money does matter, poverty levels matter a lot – for health, education, quality of life outcomes. We shouldn’t see employment support as ‘separate to’ it; it needs to be part and parcel of any anti-poverty strategy.

It’s interesting to see a renewed focus on neighbourhoods more generally in government, where JobsPlus fits perfectly.  Every Get Britain Working Plan, Pride in Place partnership, Healthy Neighbourhood plans, place-based budgets of any kind, should have a JobsPlus model in there. This harkens back to the 90s when we had Neighbourhood Renewal Fund and Working Neighbourhood Fund where more local investment in employment support took more account of local need, real places and people. We’ve lost that and we need it back.

It’s why being part of JobsPlus feels like the right pilot at the right time. Any region that genuinely want a shot at 80 per cent employment rate has to have a renewed focus on the hyper-local, and on areas of social housing. Those neighbourhoods are under-served and the people who live there have the highest needs, making place-based targeting imperative. Seeing how community-led employment support can be different than the business as usual has convinced us this is the way forward if we want to see transformative change.

We’re dedicated to this model and will do all we can to sustain and expand it to more places in Liverpool City Region.