Community
City Gateway exists to bring hope to the local community of Tower Hamlets. We try to achieve this by helping improve the quality of life for the people who live in the area, through a range of different projects, activities & practical action. 2007 has been a fantastic year for us in trying to achieve this goal.
It has one of the largest and fastest growing youth populations in Europe and also one of the most ethnically diverse, with 33% of inhabitants of Bangladeshi origin (for whom statistics reveal even higher levels of social and economic exclusion with only 31.7% in employment). Community cohesion and race relations are poor, drug use and anti-social behaviour persist and crime levels are more than double the national average.
City Gateway runs a number of training courses and outreach programmes to engage and train young people in the Borough who are not in education, employment or training (NEET). FOr more information on this please look at our Training section.
As a specific separate focus we run a Women's Project which attracts many Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic women who have very high levels of worklessness (with up to 68% economically inactive on local estates) and for whom major barriers to work include language, low skill levels, poor assertiveness and lack of childcare provision. Tower Hamlets is an incredibly diverse Borough with the Bangladeshi population alone accounting for 1 in 3 local residents.
As you browse through these community work pages we hope you grasp a sense of the quality of what we do and also the passion with which we do it. Through the committed and gifted staff team we have, both paid and voluntary, we have been able to witness exciting changes and improvements in so many different lives, and we have continued doing fantastic work in partnership with such a large range of organisations who play such a crucial role to helping us do what we do.
CEO, City Gateway
