From Gospel Oak to Infinity (and beyond!)
Words by Julia Marcus, Job Hub Lead at London Borough of Camden
We know that our resident’s journey to work can be a bumpy and frequently dispiriting journey. So for the last year or so, alongside FutureGov we’ve been developing a new approach to employment support — Good Work Camden. Working with our community partners, we’re establishing neighbourhood Job Hubs across the borough, providing wraparound support for local people in familiar and well-used settings. I’m the lead for the first of our planned Hubs in Gospel Oak, and everything was going well until….
It feels like a lifetime ago that the Neighbourhood’s team was happily anticipating our imminent move to meanwhile premises in Malden Rd, looking forward to recruiting new Job Hub staff, having a natter around the coffee machine, and cheerfully scribbling on post-it notes under the watchful gaze of FutureGov.
And for me, even more distant is the memory of sitting in Queen’s Crescent Library getting up close and personal with the good people of Gospel Oak or meeting the residents at England’s Lane hostel on Monday mornings. The stark contrast between the glorious and picturesque surrounds of Primrose Hill and Hampstead, and the hardship many of those families were experiencing, never failed to touch me.
Then the lockdown came, and it was brutal.
For the Neighbourhood’s team, there was the conundrum of looking to find a way of repurposing our project and moving it into the virtual world of Skype, the internet and Zoom (isn’t it amazing how quickly Zoom has become a standard word in our quarantine vocabulary? ‘Shall we Zoom later?’ It meant something different in the 80’s). Trying to re-model a service which relies so heavily upon its innate ability to look its service-users directly in the eye and say: We can help you. Where the power of the interaction isn’t necessarily about how salient the information is that we jot down during the resident’s first assessment but is more often about capturing the throw-away comment as we wave them goodbye, or a passing admission when we’ve met with them a second time and the trust is building.
It felt like a more challenging task than merely creating the new electronic registration and action plan forms and thinking about the wording for our link on the Camden Covid-19 information page (although these elements were rightly agonised over). There was the certain realisation that many residents would be finding themselves in unprecedented circumstances, fearing for their futures and livelihoods. We had to make sure that we were arming ourselves with the myriad of available information, constantly updating, to pass on to worried callers. To support us with this endeavour, we inducted two new team members — Angie and Geeta, kindly lent to us by Mark.B for the duration.
So now we’re the Good Work Camden Job Hub Online — small but perfectly formed and rearing to go! The enquiries have started coming in, but its early days, and much of the comms, masterminded by Emmanuel, has yet to appear. Initial Assessments are being conducted over the phone, and it’s going OK. It actually makes me proud to discover how resourceful we all are under extraordinary circumstances, and how we can, despite kicking and screaming just a little bit, adapt ourselves to new situations and unexpectedly learn something along the way: For me, it’s that human interaction can still be impactful, even without the benefit of a friendly handshake.
The Neighbourhood’s team hope that when we’re all back to normal (whatever ‘normal’ might be), we can incorporate some of the ideas and learnings from the last few weeks into the Job Hub model of the future.
Having said that, give me human human interaction any old day of the week- I never thought I’d live to see the day, but I’m even missing the post-it notes.
