You may think that, having run events for the most of the past 6 months, it’s a little bit late in the day to be celebrating the launch of the Lansbury Lodge Women’s Project but we felt otherwise! The launch event recognised that the project is now getting fully underway and preparing to offer new ICT, literacy & numeracy, and employability courses in addition to the parenting, creative arts and language courses already on offer. The new courses all fit in with our goals of motivating and upskilling local women to make them job ready and are hopefully just a glimpse of the things to come in the future including culinary courses and a cleaning social enterprise.

We partied in style and enticed women from across the community to join us with free food, drinks, a bouncy castle, craft activities and even displays from some of the very young dancers we work with! The event was also an opportunity to congratulate more than 20 women who have already completed our courses and saw almost 200 people, young and old, come and find out more. It was great to see such a variety of people coming together and mixing and it'll be a strong boost to our new courses to have a load of new women on board from the word go.

If there were laws about over-using alliteration this newsletter would surely have broken them by now; thankfully there aren’t and it seems as good a title as any to tell you about the exciting new partnerships we’re forging in the community. Working together with other agencies we hope to soon be able to open the Limehouse Youth Centre up all day, every day and most evenings too – we've set our aims very high but we do have a climbing wall to help us get there watch this space!

The Gateway Media team, which has been based for a while at our Lansbury Lodge centre, has moved back to the Montefiore Centre, our original base near Whitechapel. As you can see we’re sprucing the place up a bit with a fresh coat of paint so feel free to drop by, have a nose around and discuss your media needs.

Gateway Media is one of our most succesful social enterprises and is pushing ahead into exciting new areas of media including streaming video and user editable content - we'd love to film your next event!

We’ve been running both Engage and Engage Plus courses all Summer and have seen 28 young people come on board and pass their entry level 3 numeracy with us. Just last week 11 of them took a more advanced literacy exam and we’re crossing our fingers for them all until we hear the results!

The Export Course has been focussing on work placements towards the end of the Summer and have seen some real success stories already. Take for instance Shuhel and Monsor, who’s been with us right through our three courses, who have just progressed onto a 6 week work placement in Allen and Overy’s IT department – a really incredible opportunity for them both.

Of all the busy people in City Gateway this Summer, James would be a front runner for the title of the busiest. Not only has he helped manage our complete outreach programme, the transition into new premises and the development of the Limehouse Youth Centre he’s also got married, been on honeymoon and moved house. It’s been awesome to see James really take the initiative in developing our new youth centre and you can expect to read much more about what he’s achieving there over the next few months. If you're interested in getting involed with the project in any way then drop James a line!

We’re delighted to say that long-term staff member Oli is now the proud father of a tiny little fellow called Dylan (presumably named after Bob). He’s had a little while off to discover the joys of parenthood but is back in the office this week if you want to pass on your congratulations, hard learned tips or Mothercare vouchers click here.