About Us

City Gateway is a charity dedicated to bringing hope to Tower Hamlets by engaging, mentoring and training disengaged and excluded individuals from across the Borough.

Its primary focus has traditionally been young people who, for whatever reason, end up falling out of education, employment and training and tend to become unmotivated and disengaged. We run an extensive outreach program across the Borough including regular football and youth club sessions, DJing and MCing sessions on our mobile studio bus and street teams who simply get to know the young people where they are.

Our training centre in Whitechapel offers a progression of courses in basic IT, media and sports which are all heavily supported by a wider range of life and employability skills workshops. The final stage of our training is a work based learning scheme, called Export, which sees trainees complete NVQ level 2 qualifications, accrue 21 days work experience in one of our social enterprises (see enterprise section) and then, in many cases, go on to additional work placement schemes with our partners in The City or long term apprenticeships with us.

Crossing the wealth and status divide in Tower Hamlets and tapping into the incredible knowledge and resources found in the financial districts is a key focus of our work and we regularly take groups of young people on 'insight' tours around the various areas of large office buildings to dispel some of the mental barriers between the two and broaden their horizons. We also benefit extensively from in-kind support and mentoring from our corporate supporters across London.

Tower Hamlets is a borough of great contrasts. It sits on the edge of the wealth in the City and is home to Canary Wharf and some of the highest wage earners in the country. Yet it is also home to communities experiencing some of the highest levels of deprivation. So much so that, overall, Tower Hamlets comes close to the top on many documented indices of deprivation.

It is a borough with an average population density of over 1,000 people per km2 and has one of the largest and fastest growing youth populations in Europe. With low educational attainment and high unemployment and crime rates, the number of young people not in economic activity is large and growing.

The government is recognising these issues and has started and pledged to continue to commit funds for dealing with this significant problem.

Click to find out more about our History