[00:00:00.090] – Speaker 1
Talk about a new community based, not for profit maintenance company which is aiming to encourage young learners to get involved.

[00:00:09.610] – Speaker 2
We’re going to be talking about CMS, but also we’re going to talk about Lincolnshire organisation, the Lincolnshire Employment Accommodation Project. And from that organisation, I’m joined now by Heidi Walton.

[00:00:22.390] – Speaker 1
Heidi, good afternoon to you.

[00:00:24.400] – Speaker 3
Good afternoon.

[00:00:25.500] – Speaker 1
Tell me a bit about Leap.

[00:00:26.880] – Speaker 2
First of all, then, as an organisation, how long you’ve been going and what you do?

[00:00:31.530] – Speaker 3
Leap has been going nearly 30 years now. In fact, next year will be our 30th anniversary. We were set up 1994 to provide housing for vulnerable people who had no home, but also no job. So it was about this link between no home, no job, no job, no home. So we were fortunate enough to get one of the first ever lottery grants, actually, to buy four houses here in Lincoln. And since then, we’ve just gone from strength to strength. So the idea is that we provide accommodation to anyone who is homeless, but primarily we work with the young people, but we can work with families, we can work with couples, we can work with single parents.

[00:01:16.210] – Speaker 1
So initially, then, it was a question of finding a property that you could then convert. Is that how it’s worked over the.

[00:01:23.550] – Speaker 2
Years, or have you built special properties.

[00:01:25.970] – Speaker 1
Now, or how does it tend to work?

[00:01:28.010] – Speaker 3
We’ve got a range of accommodations, so, yeah, a lot of our properties we’ve bought as very old properties and bought them up to a good standard, improving the property portfolio. But we’ve also got some new build properties, some flats, particularly one on Gaunt Street, which is our Adam Heath house, which is nine flats, which we opened two years ago, with the view to being able to work with more diverse range, I suppose, of people.

[00:01:56.040] – Speaker 1
And how do the people contact you? How do they get the accommodation? Does it go through the general system of people who are homeless?

[00:02:05.910] – Speaker 3
Yeah, a lot of people are referred by the City Council from the housing department. They’ll go in there and say that they’re in housing crisis and they’ll be pointed in our direction. There’s a general application form, but anyone can go onto our website.

[00:02:19.850] – Speaker 1
And is it just Lincoln that you.

[00:02:21.330] – Speaker 2
Look after at the moment?

[00:02:22.340] – Speaker 3
No. Lincoln and gainsborough. So we’ve got about 40 bed spaces in Lincoln and another 40 in Gainsborough. My goodness. We’re not big by any means, but we’ve got a good range of accommodation and all to a good standard.

[00:02:36.480] – Speaker 1
And how do you keep going? Is it supported from fundraising? Do you get grants? How does it work?

[00:02:43.190] – Speaker 3
Oh, interesting question. Obviously, we do get rents for the accommodation, of which most people can through their benefits, they can apply for their housing element, but we do have to get grant funding. We fundraise quite avidly to raise extra funds. Donations always welcome and we work with a number of really good, socially responsible organisations that often do give us bits and pieces to help us sustain us.

[00:03:18.740] – Speaker 2
And what about the sort of demand for this accommodation? Is there a lot of demand for it here in Lincolnshire?

[00:03:24.750] – Speaker 3
There certainly is. Certainly here in Lincoln, we’ve been 100% occupied since Christmas, so as soon as the bed is free, it’s refilled. We’ve got a very long waiting list.

[00:03:36.160] – Speaker 1
And how long do people tend to stay with you?

[00:03:38.170] – Speaker 2
Is there a limit as to how long somebody could stay in your accommodation?

[00:03:42.310] – Speaker 3
We’ve closed a short term accommodation, so that means they can stay with us for up to two years, but we don’t like to I suppose institutionalise people, we like to think about when is it right for them to move on from us, when have they got the skills to move on to independent living? So we very much work on the individual rather than the framework around them.

[00:04:07.060] – Speaker 1
And talking of skills, this new project.

[00:04:10.350] – Speaker 2
Which is sort of separate from what you’re actually doing with regards to running accommodation, is going to actually help maintain.

[00:04:17.880] – Speaker 1
The properties that you have.

[00:04:19.240] – Speaker 2
Tell me a bit about that.

[00:04:20.800] – Speaker 3
Yes, well, I was fortunate enough just over twelve months ago to get gained some funding through the Community Renewal Fund to set up a new community interest company. And the idea behind it was threefold, really. I’ve always been very conscious that with the people that we work with, it’s Lincolnshire Employment Accommodation Project. We do the accommodation very well and we help people into training, but we could very rarely help them into employment. So I wanted some sort of organisation where we could actually take on some of our client group.

[00:05:00.170] – Speaker 1
As apprentices to give them the trades and the skills that they need to be able to improve their lifelong circumstances for themselves.

[00:05:07.750] – Speaker 2
Sounds like a great project. Let me bring Mike Johnson MBE into the conversation here. So, Mike, tell me a bit about CMS then, which is the next step on from this, isn’t it?

[00:05:19.490] – Speaker 3
It is, and it’s a very good step forward. You know, I’ve known Heidi for a number of years and been passionate about the work that she does in Leap, but one of the things that’s always wanted to happen is this sort of like working with the housing stocks and providing maintenance and service. And I got that opportunity at a meeting that I was with Heidi and thought, this is a great opportunity to move something forward. I’ve also got a great passion about apprenticeships and traineeships and anything else about young people’s development. So this was a great way of merging all of that together through CMS and providing the new Community Interest Company, which is not for profit, where we can develop people’s skills. Ideally, if we can take the trainees from those who are in accommodation in Leap and develop those people to become our future tradespeople in construction.

[00:06:28.930] – Speaker 2
So who will do the training? I mean, have you got people on board to train these apprentices or are you doing the training?

[00:06:35.940] – Speaker 3
Well, it could be a little bit of everything Melvin here. No, we’ve actually set the business up. We have a contracts manager, Greg, who’s joined us. We’ve brought him out of retirement. He’s well known in the Lincolnshire and Gainsborough area. And Greg will be very fundamental at imparting his construction skills with the people that we take on. However, it is a much wider aspect that we want to look at here with regards to training and development. So we will be working with all the other construction training providers, both in Lincoln and in Lincolnshire, to see what we can do to work together to provide those skills.

[00:07:27.170] – Speaker 2
Mike, I want to talk a bit about some of the skills that you’re hoping some of these young apprentices will actually be trained in. So what sort of aspects are we looking here, do you think?

[00:07:36.920] – Speaker 3
We’re looking at all aspects of the construction trade. So joinery plastering, painting and decorating, brickwork. We’ll even go to gardening as well because the properties that we want to look at, we’d be looking at potentially working on the outside as well as working in the inside. So I think the sort of skill sets that we’re looking for or wanting to help people with are wide. It’s quite vast, what we want to do.

[00:08:12.180] – Speaker 2
And are you thinking there could be jobs at the end of this? It’s okay coming on an apprenticeship, but is the plan that your organisation will potentially be offering some of these people paid work at the end of it all?

[00:08:25.600] – Speaker 3
And that’s what we want? Exactly that. Obviously we’ve got to build the work up and then by building the work up, we can take on more people. Ideally, if we can start with even work experience, people want to come and have some work experience with us, we develop that into an apprenticeship and then we move that forward into either a higher apprenticeship or a proper full paid job.

[00:08:55.260] – Speaker 2
And you were telling me a moment ago, even companies that have heard a little bit about this got wind of what you’re doing. They’re keen to get involved already, aren’t they?

[00:09:04.400] – Speaker 3
They are indeed. We’ve actually got some success already because through Leap, through Heidi, we’ve looked at a number of the properties that needed some work doing. We’ve started that work and that sort of moved on to developing skills, which we’re at the point where we’ve got the work.

[00:09:29.290] – Speaker 2
Yes.

[00:09:29.780] – Speaker 3
We haven’t got the people.

[00:09:31.300] – Speaker 2
And that’s going to take time, isn’t it?

[00:09:33.560] – Speaker 3
It is. So Greg, our contracts manager, as I said earlier, is very known in the area and he’s got subcontractors that he’s worked with for many, many years, and those subcontractors are coming to help us, support us, do the work. And those contractors have already said that the, like, the ethos of what CMS is all about, it’s a bit like giving something back, isn’t it, as a tradesperson? So they want to give something back and have sort of pledged to be ambassadors, training ambassadors to the point that they’ll even take people with them on CMS work. And hopefully there’s a good opportunity that we can convince them to take on an apprentice and we can look at how that can be controlled and managed.

[00:10:27.840] – Speaker 2
This must be really quite exciting, Heidi, because you’re now ultimately getting to this employment aspect of Leap. How excited are you at the prospect of this, that we’ll get people into work over the next months and years?

[00:10:41.620] – Speaker 1
It’s something I’ve been dreaming of for a long time and I’m so thrilled that we can now actually get there and start offering people apprenticeships with, like I say, trades, good quality trades that are going to take people into independence and a quality employment for the long term.

[00:11:00.220] – Speaker 2
You’ve got a special launch event coming up as well, haven’t you, Mike? Tell me a bit about that.

[00:11:04.230] – Speaker 3
We have it’s on Tuesday, the 18 April. We’ve actually based ourselves in the incubation units down at Bishop or BG.