In one of his last appearances as Chancellor, Gordan Brown, accompanied by Alan Johnson and John Hutton, launched the Government's new Skills Pledge initiative and City Gateway was the very first charity to sign up.

As you can just see in the picture the City Gateway logo is positioned next to giants like BT, McDonalds and Airbus. By making the Skills Pledge, employers commit to support all their employees to develop basic literacy and numeracy skills and work towards a full level 2 qualification equivalent to five GCSEs A* to C.

The recent Grand Designs Live show filled out the ExCel Centre in East London with over 600 exhibitors and almost 50,000 guests... and Gateway Media was there to film the entire event!

Taking over where a team from Channel 4 left off last time, a 5-strong team from our media enterprise combed through every corner of the exhibition finding the biggest, smallest, prettiest and most amazing sites of the show which we've used to produce the official video that will advertise next year's show. It was a great opportunity to boost our portfolio, give some of our volunteers hands on media experience and of course to raise money for City Gateway!

The Lansbury Lodge Women's Project is an exciting development over at our Lansbury Lodge outpost. Since its inception we have worked with the London Development Agency to provide training and progression routes for women from predominantly BAME (Black And Minority Ethnic) backgrounds, enabling isolated women to receive training.

The project tackles barriers to employment often experienced by women in deprived areas by raising awareness of opportunities, providing childcare and releasing potential. Projects are tailored to support individual needs, and boast extra-language support in order to fully accommodate women of different backgrounds and abilities. Projects range from Floristry, Embroidery and Textiles, and Parenting training courses, to ICT skills and Employability workshops.

It's all hands on deck as long evenings and scorching afternoons (any day now...) announce the coming of one of City Gateway's busiest seasons and the launch of the Summer Outreach Programme. Simon & Sam will be joining our team permanently whilst Hannah, James & (former staff member) Rez will be with us throughout the Summer, lending a hand with the enterprises, outreach, media & IT respectively.

In the build up to their hotly anticipated Summer programme the Outreach team has expanded it's football sessions and now plays 3 evenings a week down on the Mile End football pitches. These sessions are a brilliant opportunity for volunteers to get stuck in with our work outside of working hours, for more info contact Suzy (suzy@citygateway.org.uk).

20 fresh faced trainees started a new Engage course with us this month and were launched into the programme with an induction day jointly hosted by a group of volunteers from Goldman Sachs who led an inspiring session in the morning and took everyone bowling at the Trocadero in the afternoon. The launch day was a new initiative for us and was a brilliant way to inspire the trainees and give them a chance to start getting to know one another.

Our Export course work placements have drawn to a close and our most senior trainees now have at least 21 days of work experience under their belts. Over the past month they've been involved in everything from football coaching over at West Ham FC, through filming speedboat chases on the Thames to looking after babies at our daily creche. The programme has included exciting opportunities to visit a real variety of work places, see the possibilities available to them and engage with a wealth of different people.

By day ginger Joe is our principal web and print designer and heads up our Push Publising initiative, by night his brush of creativity laces every edition of our monthly newsletter with life, colour and a curious touch of humour. Sadly too modest to allow himself to be featured in previous editions, it's taken us this long to persuade him to take annual leave at the right time to sneak him in.

This is one of the only pictures of Joe in existence, and it took us a few weeks to find one, but here he is in his natural environment, which is generally 'grainy'.

We are on the verge of acquiring an incredible new building where all of City Gateway's main activities will be centrally based; the move will give us the extra space and facilities we so desperately need as we continue to expand our involvement in the community.

It's a huge project and a heavy burden in the short term which we are hoping to lighten by encouraging our supporters to get involved in making the Stepney Life Centre a reality, contact bex@citygateway.org.uk if you want to hear more about the various opportunities we have available.

A great load was taken off our minds (and London's congested car parks) this month when the guys over at Trinity Buoy Wharf agreed to allow us to park The Bus there at weekends for the foreseeable future.

I don't think we can stress enough how big an impact The Bus is having on our work in allowing us to put on fully blown studio and media sessions in the heart of Tower Hamlets! It hasn't been an easy beast to park so we'd like to say a big thank you to the guys at the Wharf for stepping in so enthusiastically.