Participle

The current approach to unemployment is a complex, transactional service that only responds to market failure. Whilst current services succeed in getting some people into work some of the time, they are expensive, have high failure rates and do not support those in work to move up the skills curve.

Over 5 months Participle has worked with our partners, Lambeth and Lewisham Councils, Further Education Colleges, the London Development Agency, LSIS and the citizens of both our locations to develop a new, actionable vision for a sustainable working life: EmployAbility.

We started from a different place: with people and culture. We worked in depth with 140 people – people in work, out of work, cycling in and out of work, students, local employers, providers and those involved in economic policy. We wanted to develop a new narrative about work, supported by a different set of organisations, drawing on a wider set of relationships and resources within the community, with strong integration to wider economic issues and opportunities, to employers (current and future), to education and to micro enterprise activity.

Insights from this work showed the critical role that connections and wider
relationships play in “employability”. It also showed us how fragile many of these social
networks are. We learnt how stuck and lacking in momentum were the majority of those we met, mainly in response to current systems that hold them in an unproductive pattern. Most surprisingly we learnt that this “no momentum” culture was widely shared by the local SME sector as the struggle to survive the recession removes the desire to take risks and to some extent by the FE colleges whose funding structures have gradually forced a curriculum and culture, which far from being galvanising, actually supports the unemployment system, despite the commitment and insights of those within these institutions.

It was clear that developing meaningful approaches to support life-changing employability would be complex and would need to encompass the working community, employers and educators, as much as the unemployed themselves. This insight has been supported during the short life of our project by recent longitudinal research in the US, which shows that working with employers and the demand side is as critical as working with the unemployed.1

In response we developed two network based prototypes: Momentum and Backr. Momentum does what it says: it builds people’s momentum, connections and ability to create opportunities for themselves through a combination of work, social activities and collective reflection. Backr is a platform that connects local residents, employees and corporate partners to invest in the goals and aspirations of people who want to move into work – forging meaningful connections between currently very separate social and economic spheres.

A socio cultural approach to issues of employment and employability (as opposed to a transactional economic approach) resonates with the unemployed themselves, with businesses and the wider community. A huge opportunity exists to look beyond the welfare lens and develop a broader story of community economic development.

Momentum and Backr are components of an alternative employability system. Our work going forward will be to put these new services into practice in Lambeth, and to further develop and prototype a number of supporting solutions with other key parts of the employability ecosystem such as the local business community and further education.