Dear #SubscriberFirstName# #SubscriberLastName#,

SEASON'S GREETINGS 

Ebns Chief Executive, Graham Edwards, and all the ebns team send festive greetings and wish all our readers a very happy and prosperous New Year.

NEW YEAR, NEW OFFICE: WE ARE MOVING

On Monday 18 December, ebns is relocating to the newly regenerated Fort Dunlop. The building is a landmark sustainable development, boasting the UK?s largest living green roof, and will place ebns at the heart of the Regeneration Zone.

Please keep our new contact details for your records:

Suite 215, Fort Dunlop
Fort Parkway
Birmingham
B24 9FD

Telephone: 0121 776 5730

We also ask all our partners to bear with us during this hectic time, as we will not be fully operational until Thursday next week. We look forward to seeing you all at our new offices in the future!

ALSO MOVING?

Our colleagues North Solihull Partnerships have a new office in Kingfisher school, Kingfisher Drive, Smith?s Wood. We wish them all the best settling in and look forward to continuing our strong partnership work from our new bases.

STRATEGIC INVESTMENT PLAN (SIP) UPDATES:

ebns have been working hard to move forward our Strategic Implementation Plans, which will provide the future framework for ebns activity over the coming years. The SIPs will move ebns activity to a strategic and commissioning based approach to project development, and will focus on a small number of strategic, high impact plans rather than ad hoc, low impact projects. The 7 SIPs are:

• Enterprising Communities
•  Eastside and Digbeth Growth Through Enterprise
•  North Solihull Jobs, Skills and Enterprise
• Creating Economic Prosperity Through Local Employment Centres
• Development of Employment Land
• Growth In the Environmental Business Sector
• Jobs, Skills & Enterprise.

We will be updating our readers of the progress of the SIPs as they unfold, and the website will include information on the SIPs from early next year. In this month?s newsletter we focus on the developments in Jobs Skills and Enterprise.

JOBS SKILLS AND ENTERPRISE ASPECTS OF ALL SIPS:

The SIP team have developed specific project ideas with our partners that take into account the AWM tasking framework output requirements and the strategic direction set by the Regional Skills Partnership, such as support for NVQ3 + qualifications.

The three skills related projects currently being developed following concept approval by the Resources Committee on 27.09.06 to proceed are:

1. Foundations for Change
2. The Centre of Excellence for Community Leadership
3. Resource Graduates

Foundations For Change:

This project will cover both the East and West Birmingham Regeneration Zones and representatives from all skills sectors and providers. It aims to fundamentally improve the quality and employment results of learning provision for workless people in our deprived communities through a programme of transformational change within training organizations.

The learning programme will target senior people within organizations, helping them to develop the skills to cascade a cross section of changes in learning provision throughout their organizations. The result will be a change not only in the content of training, but more importantly the way in which it is carried out and the results it is achieving. Participating organizations will measure the success of the programme against defined criteria through improving their employment outputs with workless people. A key project aim is to develop a recognized quality kite mark for providers that successfully complete the programme.

This is currently the most well developed of our skills proposals.

THE CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE FOR COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP

This is an umbrella project that will draw together new projects and existing high quality activity in Birmingham to address, among other things, the Central Government Sustainable Communities Agenda as identified in the Egan report.

This Centre will develop projects to deliver high levels of competence and capability in all sectors and organisations involved in Regeneration, through a range of learning programmes and development strategies. Activities will include:

• Workshop & conference events on community integration, cohesion and mutual understanding
• Change programmes for training providers of the workless
• A series of 1 day workshops on topics such as risk forecasting and management, conflict resolution and negotiation.

Most importantly the Centre will aim to meet the needs identified by the community. It is envisaged that the Centre will also have a research and evaluation role to contribute to its economic sustainability.

Preliminary work has begun on this proposal, and will be fully developed in the new year.

RESOURCE GRADUATES

This project is part of a developing Access to Work Programme which will sit across all the SIPs. This project has the potential to serve both the East Birmingham North Solihull Regeneration Zone and the West Birmingham area of the Arc of Opportunity Zone. It is aimed at:

• ·Getting workless graduates, or graduate equivalents, into work
• Getting under employed graduates, or graduate equivalents, into level 3 or 4 jobs

The project will benefit graduates from the region, and could be used to encourage foreign students to remain in Birmingham post-graduation. Key employers serving the Regeneration Zones will also benefit from a highly skilled, highly qualified workforce.

The projectwill likely focus on various strands of learning leading to employment where our research indicates that there is a defined business need. Consideration is being given to:

1. Quality Standards- including training in quality, environmental management, and training in change facilitation to enable the learner to get a job assisting the company Quality manager, Environmental Manager etc,

2. Construction and Renovation- Including skills in heritage renovation, conservation skills, environmental construction, new building technologies and project management. This programme would be additional to opportunities at the Construction Centre of Excellence and would also include support to heritage and museum services in the region.

3. Language Skills for Professional Services- Including training in technical language, (European languages) to support EU exports, technical health advice training for ethnic minority community language speakers , training in customer care and people management skills to support the job role.

FOREIGN STUDENTS INSPIRED BY NECHELLS REGENERATION PROJECT

Nechells Regeneration Project (formerly Nechells Baths), welcomed students from Korea, China, Japan and the Congo last month, in a visit arranged by Pertemps Employment Alliance (PEA). The trip was part of a day designed to introduce the students, who are studying a MA in Social Policy at Birmingham University, to the UK?s arrangements for meeting the social, welfare and economic needs of the population. Pertemps is one of the groups running inspirational projects at the baths for the benefit of local residents.

Professor John Doling, of the University?s School of Social Sciences, said ?Students find such visits extremely interesting, and there are cases of them returning to their own countries taking with them models of UK practise that they have set about trying to adopt.?

The students also visited the Working Neighbourhoods (WiN) initiative at Newtown Shopping Centre.

SPACE TO LET FOR NOT FOR PROFIT TENANTS

Do you know a non profit organisation that is looking for office space in Nechells? Nechells Regeneration Project has accommodation available. The landmark regenerated building is a beautiful and inspiring base from which to serve the local community.

Prospective tenants should contact Anne Stanton on 0121 328 1758.

OLYMPIC OPPORTUNITIES

Small businesses in the Zone are invited to tender for jobs relating to the London Olympics. 2012 will create massive business opportunities, and Birmingham is ideally placed to benefit. Opportunities exist for businesses of all sizes across a wide range of sectors.

The WM Business Task Group has been set up to lead on identifying and maximising tender and procurement opportunities for the region. For information and advice from this company, please email info@wmbuisnesscouncil.org.uk.

Alternatively, to register your interest in tendering please visit www.london2012.com/business.

Thank you for your time.

ebns
www.ebns.co.uk