The Opportunity for All strand of the Future Ambition Board aims to address and remove inequalities within our community by addressing poverty and low income work, and by supporting people into their first job, or into better jobs with greater prospects.
Led by David Hobdey, CEO of St John’s Foundation, the strand runs as a monthly roundtable network, bringing together charities and organisations active in addressing poverty, skills development, opportunity creation and childhood attainment to work collaboratively and to share learning.
Through these roundtable discussions, a number of new initiatives have already been put in place, including a partnership between the Southside Centre, Bath Rugby and Mercy in Action looking to building on the successful Southside Community Hubs to increase their frequency. Additionally, a project is being carried out with local charity Clean Slate which works with teenagers in disadvantaged communities to help them manage their finances better – the project aims to get the charity’s offering online to make it more accessible to local teens.
David highlighted that this strand of work overlaps with all of the others – and his ambition to feed learning from this strand into the actions of the others. For example, he is working with the Digital Connectivity strand of the Future Ambitition Board to look at the digital divide in Bath – those people without access to the internet and the impacts this has on their prospects. By working together, along with local leaders addressing the digital divide such as Annie Legge of Tech4Good South West and Fiona Dawson of Mayden and the Bath Bridge Digital Divide Collective, the two FAB strands are exploring ways to bring high speed internet to communities at risk of digital poverty.
Additionally, David highlights that there is a lot of support available in the Bath area for skills development, as is being mapped by the Inclusive Innovation strand of work, but a lot of this fails to reach those communities that most need it. Through working across these two FAB strands, identifying the gaps in this support and addressing these through the Opportunity for All group of organisations, more local people will be given access to skills training.