Family Approach

Family Approach delivering a whole family approach to parental employment.

We are delighted to have the opportunity to scale up our parental employment activity in Fife.

Fife Gingerbread has a great track record of delivering effective and successful employability services in Fife. Our approach is positioned in the early stages of the Fife Employability Pathway and is centered around engagement, overcoming barriers and relationship building.

Making it Work for lone parents is funded through the Opportunities Fife Partnership (who facilitate and commission Scottish Government employability funding locally). This new initiative will extend our parental employment activity and will be funded through the Parental Employment stream within Best Start, Bright Futures (Scotland’s current tackling child poverty delivery plan).

We will be enhancing our current offering to families in Fife and in order to do so we are delighted to be recruiting a new team to deliver this important work – starting with a Team Leader.

The broad outline of the project  is that we will engage with:

• parents from the Child Poverty priority family groups

AND

• families living in targeted wards of mid-Fife with persistently high rates of child poverty (Benarty, Cardenden & Lochgelly and Kirkcaldy Central & East and Buckhaven, Methilhill and Wemyss).

This new initiative will offer whole family support to parents when thinking about their journey towards training, education and work. And will be delivered in partnership with Citizens Advice & Rights Fife, as the primary driver for the work is tackling child poverty therefore financial inclusion activity will be key to success. The team has been designed based on our experience, existing partnerships / relationships and the anticipated needs of families. In the first year the team will be tasked with engaging with at least 90 families.

The project will be designed collaboratively with families embedding co-production principles, a strengths based approach and capacity building. Ensuring that the work responds and prioritises the needs of the community it is funded to serve. Over the course of the funding we will monitor employability led output requirements such as new registrations, completed training, job starts and education. Additionally, we will use Outcome Star to understand the impact of the project to improving the lives of families.

This project must be grounded in key policy and practice areas including:

• Child Poverty

• Fair Work

• Community Wealth Building

• Whole Family Approach

• GIRFEC

• No Wrong Door Approach  

• SHANNARI

• Every Contact Counts

Partnership working will play a key role in the successful delivery of this work  - there are a number of established projects and organisations delivering brilliant services in the identified areas. This offer from Fife Gingerbread must add value, avoid duplication of activity and offer families a joined up approach. Based on successful performance (i.e. meeting funder targets) the work will be funded until 2025 therefore capacity building to ensure that the Family Approach leaves a positive legacy in the identified Wards is paramount.

Laura Millar (Strategic Manager) shared her thoughts on the project:

“We are thrilled to be able to extend our parental employment activity, and to offer a more targeted placed-based approach in Fife. At Fife Gingerbread we believe that good, healthy and well paid work can be a route out of poverty for families. And have a significant impact on improving outcomes for the whole family, often changing the trajectory for children and young people growing up in complex circumstances. We are looking for a team full of energy, commitment and innovation to join us in developing this work.”

Keep an eye on our website and social media for more vacancies, and to track the development of the project.