Partnership work supports young people into work at Jobs Fair

On Wednesday 1st June 2022, officers from the Kensington and Chelsea youth engagement team and Al Manaar Mosque worked together to put on a jobs fair for young people and adults at Al Manaar Mosque North Kensington, to support them back into work and offering training opportunities, with over 70 people attending the event looking for work.

This is the second jobs fair in which the youth engagement team and staff from Al Manaar have organised, with the first fair happening in December 2021, which over 50 people attended in the grip of Covid. After sitting down to plan the jobs fair, it was decided that we should try and engage more organisations to attend, ensuring we had a good mix of jobs on offer. After making contact with the different organisations, we had 13 who confirmed they could attend the event, offering a range of jobs and training opportunities.

On the day of the event, organisations arrived nice and early to set up their stalls, with the jobs fair starting at 4pm. There was a steady stream of young people and adults who attended the event, with the youngest being 15 years old and oldest being 54 years old, engaging with the many different organisations.

There were also people attending from as far as Croydon, but also a lot of people from the local community looking for work. Refreshments on the day were provided by the community kitchen at the mosque, which went down well, with all hot food going very fast. Also, the local MP Felicity Buchan attended which was great to see her supporting the event.

This event showed the great partnership work which is happening to support the local community, plus breaking down barriers and people’s perception of the some of the organisations. A few of the organisations who attended the event were the Met Police Recruitment team, London Fire Brigade, Army recruitment team, London Sports Trust, QPR community Trust, Princes Trust, Wates construction, Youth Construction, University Campus of Football Business, New Flame solutions, Job Centre, RBKC Targeted Prevention team plus more.

One of the youth engagements roles is to facilitate the Youth Independent Advisory Group with young people from Kensington and Chelsea to tackle issues in their community, one of the main issues the young people brought up at the last few meetings was that the young people find it hard to find jobs, so it was great to see some of these young people attending the event looking for work, with two of them signing up with London fire brigade to start the recruitment process.