Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Pedal Power was founded in 2000 and actually came out of Ely hospital in Cardiff, and this
was a hospital for adults with learning disabilities. But it soon progressed to being a lot more
than working with people with learning disabilities. People really all ages, all abilities, all
nationalities, coming along to Pedal Power and it's a great thing to see people enjoying
cycling. The key thing is to be able to match up young
people who are determined to work with employers who are keen to expand their operations and
what we've found, time and time and time again, is that young people who've entered a Job's
Growth Wales scheme, they're job ready so they may well have found work at some point
down the line but it could've been a huge distance from work without this intervention.
So it's managed to avoid seeing thousands of young people experience the damaging consequences
of long-term unemployment. Equally, it's enabled companies who were hoping, but not in a position
to be able to recruit, to actually bring forward their growth plans and so it's driven the
economic improvements that we've seen. I started volunteering at Pedal Power and
the opportunity came up for the Jobs Growth Wales scheme and it's just been brilliant.
Because when you learn on the job it's so much better than than learning from paper,
basically. There's so many different people that you work with, and so many different
opportunities for skills to be developed, I've learned so much from being on the course.
I'm getting slightly more resposibility in certain areas, it's in team leadership so
i run volunteers here and get to learn about management basically and how businesses work.
I finished a degree in Psychology in Cardiff Uni and I was looking for jobs and thought
I might as well do some volunteering, so I came here to start with to do some volunteering
because I thought it was an excellent opportunity to work alongside adults with learning disabilities.
I was here for about two days and they're like we have this opportunity so I took it
up and here I am now. The best thing is it's so varied. One day I'll be in the cafe mentoring
an adult with learning disabilites and maybe helping them do some cooking, and the next
day I might be going off delivering hand-made sandwiches to offices. It's very varied and
you never know what's going to happen the next day which is brilliant for me.
I find the Jobs Growth Wales programme a really good programme and I think we're lucky to
be involved and it's great to see people progress.