4. Community Updates
4.1 Cllr Jacca introduced the community updates and informed the Assembly that she now had a surgery at the Lewington Centre every third Friday of the month from 3.00-5.00pm.
4.2 Sarah Lang reminded residents that the Deptford Challenge Trust Funding was open for bids for local project. Full details at www.deptfordchallengetrust.org.uk
4.3 Sarah drew residents’ attention to the fact sheet for Lewisham’s Small & Faith Funding which has just launched. To be considered, projects need to reach 15% of their total funding on Crowdfunder. Full details are on the Crowdfunder website http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/funds/lewisham
4.4 Denise Atkinson introduced herself, explaining that she was the Local Labour & Business Co-ordinator for the borough. Denise had been invited to Evelyn Community Forum as there were concerns that local people were not accessing local opportunities.
4.5 One of the actions from the meeting was to design a poster campaign to make people more aware of the service which includes
· Job and training e-mail alerts
· Free training courses and workshops
· Information on apprenticeships, traineeships and work experience opportunities
Q. What is the criteria for signing up?
A. This is open to residents who are unemployed or those who are working but under employed. You do not have to be in receipt of benefits.
4.6 Denise explained that her roll included ensuring that apprenticeships were written into Section 106 agreements.
Q. Have any Lewisham residents entered employment through the project?
A. We know that residents are entering employment as we monitor this by postcode on a monthly basis.
Q. If this is funded by Section 106 then it is taking money from the local community and giving it to your agency. We need to see the benefit.
A. All construction project have an element of funding for supporting local employment. This is put into a central pot and projects are delivered locally.
Q. Will there be a baseline for each developer to measure the impact of the poster campaign and can this be fed back to us in a recommendation report?
A. We do measure this monthly so we will be able to see if there is an impact.
4.8 A resident pointed out that one of the issues that impacts on the figures is the use of sub-contractors as the percentage of sub-contracted staff is very high on building sites.
4.9 Trina Lynskey outlined the work of Deptford Folk who are the park users group for Deptford Park & Folkstone Gardens. Details of the mailing list are on the postcards on each seat.
4.10 Deptford Folk are currently encouraging people to get involved in the consultation regarding the Lord Palmerstone pub on the Lewisham planning portal which is open until 1st February. Please do comment.
4.11 Deptford Folk hope to work with Denise and her team to ensure that this becomes a viable local business.
4.12 Lastly, Deptford Folk have been successful in securing £10,000 funding for bike project over the next year so look out for these events. Part of the funding is to training a young person to be able to run sessions with the community.