City Gateway is a charity dedicated to bringing hope to the local communities of Tower Hamlets - we run youth & women’s projects, working in partnership with neighbouring businesses.

It’s been a busy couple of months for us with our first volunteer open evening, a visit from Ed Balls MP (Secretary of State for Children, Families and Schools) and even coverage on Channel 4 News and in the Sunday Times. You’ll have to read about all that on the News section of our website though as there isn’t room for it all here!

This month we’ve been given the exciting opportunity to have a window display down at the Canary Wharf Canada Mall shopping centre. As part of the Canary Wharf Group’s community arts project we’re showcasing a unique display which focuses on the different perspectives people who live or work in Tower Hamlets have.

We challenged many of the women, young people and partners (including our favourite actor Sir Ian McKellen) we work with to sum up their feelings on the borough on just a Post-It note and the end result is the brightly coloured speech bubble now on display. Special thanks to Gateway Media for their support in pulling it all together!

Our youth team’s continuingly efforts to tackle issues facing local young people has seen them launch a new Romance Academy project. A small group of young people went away for a residential weekend this February and had the challenge of looking after `virtual´ babies - dolls which cried lots and needed all the attention of a real baby.

Most of those involved really rose to the challenge and proved they would have what it takes to be a parent - but they were all glad to be able to give the dolls and the responsibility back at the end of the couple of days. The weekend was also an opportunity to build their leadership skills and get their input into how to improve our services.

The focus of our work remains firmly on training up local individuals and helping them find employment and our youth training team have been busy getting our first cohort through our new Customer Service BTEC Level 2 qualification. We’re looking to build and develop the course and are keen for volunteers and partners to help us do so!

One trainee, Shah Alom, has been shortlisted for the `Real Apprentice´ scheme, a 10 week placement with guaranteed paid employment at the end. He is extremely excited about the opportunity and after a recent Insight Tour of the Tower of London commented “I really want to be like those people!” referring to the volunteers who’d showed the group round.

It’s been a very busy time for our enterprises with Flavour Gateway expanding its operations, Gateway Media running a `Tesco Law´ workshop and Gateway Decisive (our new IT enterprise) preparing to beta test its new management database software. Around all that the team have been helping us prepare for the launch of ‘MyWorkGateway’.

This project will be the LAP 8 employment hub and will be an exciting new opportunity for us to provide IAG to local residents as well as to showcase the services already available on the Island. If you’re a local organisation who’d like to find out more about partnering or being promoted by the project get in touch or check out the site when it launches.