Working Assets
Challenging negative and deficit based assessment and support models, working with young people in a more positive way.
Working Assets is a project funded by The Tenant Services Authority through the innovation and best practice programme established under the Housing Corporation in 2008.
The project set out to explore the theme of young people tackling the problems associated with employability. The Foyer Federation has collaborated with Axiom Housing Association to create a Working Assets Model to replicate across other Housing Associations and other Foyer-like provisions.
Working Assets moves beyond simply helping young people to cope with dependency. We want to transform young people's outcomes and help shape sustainable solutions which work for them. This requires a new approach to how we respond to young people's experiences of disadvantage. Working Assets seeks not only to improve the outcomes achieved by individual young people, but to change the way in which programmes and services are designed, commissioned, funded, delivered and evaluated across the third and public sector.
Working Assets focuses on what young people have to offer their communities, and what communities can offer to young people. This forms an aspirational deal for young people making the transition into independent adulthood. A key part of becoming independent is defined through employment and beneficial activity. Thus, the 'deal' offered to young people must express the way in which young people can find an employable role in their community, and how the community enables access for young people to offer the talents, vision and energy they possess.
How we shape that deal, and how young people and the communities in which they live can understand and develop the 'assets' which define this deal, lies at the heart of the Working Assets Model.
The Pilot Project
In 2008, the Foyer Federation partnered with Axiom HA to launch the first Working Assets Pilot Project in Peterborough Foyer. We are now offering other Foyer services the opportunity to work with us on this exciting new programme, so that we can apply the Working Assets approach across the Foyer network more widely. There is a detailed description of the Peterborough Foyer pilot project below, as well as information about the tender opportunity open to all Foyers.