Training and work

For people whose lives have been chaotic and unsettled, it isn’t always easy to find a job, or even to plan for the future.

Thames Reach helps homeless, vulnerable and socially excluded people to take up training, education, volunteering and work opportunities. This raises people's self-esteem and combats isolation and depression. For many, it will lead to financial independence.

We help people into mainstream training and work, but also run schemes that offer more specialised support. These include:

• paid traineeships working at Thames Reach

• Travel, which provides volunteering roles and job training

• the Farm and Conservation project, in which people get out of the city and work on the land

• the arts project Vision Impossible

• Moving In Moving On, a painting and decorating training course

• the social businesses Shift and StreetShine 

Thames Reach's commitment to helping the homeless into work extends to a belief that we should employ them ourselves.

Through our GROW scheme, we have achieved our target of having 10% of our workforce made up of former homeless people by 2007. We now aim to have 15% of the workforce with a history of homelessness by 2009.