We’re expanding to meet high demand for our services for society
The last 6 months has seen our social enterprise Society Matters cic go from strength to strength, and the demand for our services has been increasing significantly. Despite the outbreak of COVID-19 causing the postponement of UK-wide face to face delivery, we saw a sharp increase in demand for our specialist training in Universal Credit; so rather than be defeated we decided to step up a gear.
We’re delighted to have been able to appoint a new team member, Adam Matthews who has joined us as Social Welfare Instructor for our learning and development programme team.
Lee Booth, Trading Manager
Adam has worked as an adviser for Citizens Advice North Yorkshire for the past few years, so brings with a wealth of experience in welfare benefits, debt and mental health support that he’s keen to share with our customers through our social welfare learning and development programme.
Heather Lee, Chair of the Society Matters board explains “Adam is joining us at a critical time when, now more than ever, more capacity and capability is needed in the system to support an unprecedented number of people who find themselves on Universal Credit due to the effects of the pandemic.”
Alongside Adam’s arrival we’ve also been busy with moving all of our training into a virtual classroom environment. The beauty of the virtual classroom is that we can deliver the training from anywhere to people all over the country, whilst retaining the important element of discussion which allows people to share their knowledge about the complex topics we cover in the training – this helps to embed and deepen knowledge for the group.
We tested our new approach with the support of staff from Northumbrian Water who were keen to understand Universal Credit so they could give even more support to customers struggling to pay their bills. This proved to be a huge success, with really positive outcomes reported in terms of staff learning, engagement and the learning objectives of all of the participants being met. So with their endorsement we are now keen to roll out the training out to other organisations as understanding Universal Credit has never been as important as it is right now.
With the successful migration of our Get to Grips with Universal Credit course online, we have also been busy with the development of a range of other courses and there’s a lot more to follow! Get in touch – we’d love to hear from you if you’d like to know how we can help your organisation to make your mark.
