Oliver Healey, 32, is the team lead at Teamwork Trust’s Kettering centre. Oliver’s specialism is employability, equipping our service users with the experiences, education and knowledge needed to prepare them for the world of volunteering and employment. Here, Oliver talks about the challenges and opportunities …

My specialism focuses on…

Supporting service users with their employability skills. Put simply, this means providing our service users with work experience, employment advice and coaching, volunteering opportunities and career development. Shockingly, people with a disability are almost twice as likely to be unemployed as people without and three times as likely to be economically inactive. So, helping get our service users with employability is a priority for Teamwork Trust and my role sees me supporting people at all three of our centres.

Day to day my role includes …

Providing hands-on employability experience and running employability and volunteering programmes. These skills enhance service users’ lives, equip them with work skills and build their independence and confidence.

One service user, for example, was really nervous about trying out new things when he first joined us. He needed support with transitioning into a group setting, and a lot of one-to-one help with building his confidence. However, thanks to all the employability support we gave him, he quickly became comfortable at Teamwork Trust and he now loves what is known as the ‘outsourcing work’ at Teamwork Trust – which is when we partner with local businesses and set up mini production lines to teach service users all kinds of logistics skills including picking, packing, assembling, quality control and time management.

It's essential to us that the businesses we work with…

Fit with our charity values. We only partner with businesses that our service users want to work with, that share our values. These businesses share some of their work with us, visit our centres, explain their processes, customers and approach and our service users then create their own production line and try their hand at tasks including packing, picking, assembling and wrapping. Businesses pay us for this service, and all income is invested back into the charity.

One business we work with is Sywell-based lighting manufacturers Collingwood Lighting. Service users assemble boxes and pack lights and accessories ready for the company to collect and distribute. We’ve had some excellent press coverage about this partnership and we’ve won awards for the way we partner with businesses in this way.

My future plans for Teamwork Trust include…

Identifying more businesses that we can work closely with, so we can provide our service users with even more opportunities. Our newest project is focused on PAT testing, which stands for Portable Appliance Testing. This is the process of checking electrical appliances for safety through a series of visual inspections and electronic tests. I am qualified to perform PAT testing, and we are now training our service users to in PAT testing so that we can offer this service to local business. This will be a great revenue stream for our organisation and it also means businesses cannot just be compliant but can also be supporting a charity at the same time.

I started at Teamwork…

As a volunteer one day a week. I heard about the charity through a service connected to the counselling I was receiving at the time and was keen to support them. In 2017, I started an apprenticeship in Health and Social Care with both Stamford College and Teamwork Trust and was learning how to become a support worker. Now, my role is ‘Transition Lead – Employability’, and it is my dream job. I love coming up with creative ideas to help service users’ progress and reach their goals, and I enjoy helping the charity fulfil their vision.

 

 

If you’re a business interested in working with us please get in touch.

If you are interested in finding out more about outsourcing visit: Click to Contact

Our 3 Centre Leads -  Sam, Olly & Kizzy