The Reader Apprenticeship Programme: Building Opportunities for Life

Here at TRO, we are incredibly pleased to officially announce the launch of our major fundraising campaign for 2012, The Reader Apprenticeships: Building Opportunities for Life.

With an impressive fundraising target of £14,000, we aim to raise enough money to employ one young person to work here with us at TRO HQ in Liverpool next year, specifically a young care-leaver between the ages of 16-22. Having done a great deal of work with Looked After Children in Merseyside over the past 4 years, we feel passionately about providing these young people with the means to build an independent and fulfilled life.

The apprenticeship will be a life changing experience, consisting of practical, community-based, creative work experience in a flexible programme that will accommodate complex needs and develop several core competencies:

• Social: Social Awareness and Social Skills
• Emotional Resilience: The ability to cope with rebuffs which may be short-term or shocks which consume long periods of time
• Enterprise & Creativity: The ability to shape situations, imagine alternatives, remain open to new ideas, problem-solve and work in teams
• Discipline: Inner discipline to pursue goals and the ability to cope with external discipline

 No formal qualifications will be required to enter the programme; we want to support individuals with a spark, or a desire to make something of their lives, or with passion to learn or to change.

The apprenticeship will also provide financial support; Looked After Children are statistically the most underprivileged in our society, and here at TRO we aim to offer a wage that will help turn their lives around. We will offer an hourly starting wage of £6.32, which is well above the apprentice national minimum wage of £2.60 (£4,732 per year). There are 985 Looked After Children living in Merseyside, vulnerable young people who face huge emotional, educational and financial  pressures when they turn 16 and we are determined to support them in a life changing way. Paying a young apprentice who has recently left care £4,732 per year will not give them the financial support to live independently or to significantly improve their quality of life. This is why we want to raise the money ourselves, so that we can pay these young people a living wage that will give them the opportunity to overcome some of the many challenges that they face. 

So, how will we do it? Let me hand you over to our wonderful Mr Niall Gibney, who will unveil some of our fundraising plans….

Hello, I’m Niall. I’m the Community Development Assistant here and first apprentice here at The Reader Organisation. As it stands, I’m one and a half years into my apprenticeship and I’ve already undergone a wide variety of tasks during my time here! However, this year I’ve been given the ultimate task of them all – to be the driving force behind our organisation’s effort to raise £14,000 via the use of community fundraising! Sounds like a biggie? Well, it is! If I can put this into perspective, last year, our whole organisation raised £3,000 via this type of fundraising, so this year’s £14,000 target is a whopping increase! As you can imagine a lot of hard work will be put in by TRO staff and we have already started fundraising with things such as: a collection in Liverpool University on World Book Day, a Valentines event at The Lauries, a cake sale, Amazon fundraising, an Easter egg raffle, a raffle at the Bebington Library Dickens Celebration, and these are all leading up to our MAMMOTH Three Peaks fundraiser….But I’ll leave Eleanor to tell you more about that in the next blog.

So there you have it, that is what we hope to do over the next 12 months and as I believe in this vital cause you will most likely be hearing much more from me…

Visit our website to find out more about how you can donate and keep checking the blog to find out about how you can help with our first major fundraiser - the Three Peaks Challenge!