Tower Hamlets in Your Hands Project Summary

Providing support, training and various other purposeful activities to young Bangladeshi people in the London borough of Tower Hamlets, we at the Monakka Monowar Welfare Foundation, are proud to present to you our project funded by the Clothworkers Foundation.  “Tower Hamlet in Your Hands”, that started on July 2011 and lasted until January 2012.

Purpose

The purpose of this project was to help the young residents of Tower Hamlets to benefit from the services and opportunities available to them. There are various projects and activities going on in the area, but sometimes people just don’t know about them. For this reason MMWF aimed to help people take advantage of the activities, socialize and feel members of the society. All this would help the young Bangladeshi members of the community to participate actively the life of Tower Hamlets and would eliminate social exclusion and idleness. 

 




How was the Project Implemented

With the grand given by the Clothworkers Foundation, MMWF bought 5 computers together with a print/copy machine.

It was then that MMWF employed 25 people from the local community. The selection of the participants was very simple. MMWF released an advert in the local newspaper and started interviewing people. The selected group was gender-balanced and all participants took IT literacy courses over a period of 6 months. When participants completed the course a newsletter was created, as well as a semi-permanent editorial office. The “editorial team” formed was supposed to write about new career and leisure opportunities in Tower Hamlets as well as other interesting, educational and useful events and to popularize them. Even though the project didn’t go as planned in the beginning, there were some significant achievements. 

 

Some of the Many Achievements


1. With the help of the Clothworkers Foundation and the UK Online Centre more than 15 IT training courses were held in the office, where the 5 computers are. 

 
2. Training courses were organized for older members of the community, so they got engaged too, and reported that they feel a lot more at ease working with a computer after they successfully completed the course.
 

 
3. MMWF provided free access to the Internet for all those members of the community who don’t have Internet in their homes and indeed quite a lot of them don’t have, or don’t know how to use it. This way more than 35 people come to the office and use the computers and the copy/print machine. 

 
4. Around 25 young people from the locality were engaged with the project, which is still a great number of people.  

 
5. Job-seeking sessions were organized and careers advice was given to all those who needed it.

In Conclusion... 

 
The project was rated very high according by participants and overall everyone was satisfied. Even though the project was not carried as it was originally planned the achievements and the satisfaction of participants makes up for everything that didn’t happen. In future, MMWF plans to create an online newspaper and establish an editorial office.

Funded by: The Clothworkers’ Foundation 

Our beliefs 

Our primary area of focus is the ethnic minority communities in Tower Hamlets. We believe that to promote social inclusion, the members of the community must be made aware of the activities happening nearby. The aim of Tower Hamlets in Your Hands was that of bridging the gap between the many projects that take place in Tower Hamlets and the local people that are mostly unaware of the opportunities and services available to them. Tower Hamlets in Your Hands aimed at getting as many people as possible to take advantage of these existing opportunities and to become involved in the life of the local community.

What We Do

With the grant from the Clothworkers’ Foundation, we purchased 5 computers and 1 printer copy machine, which we used to engage a group of 20 – 25 people (unemployed males and females from Tower Hamlets) in IT literacy courses that resulted in the creation of a blog/newsletter (http://mmwf-newsletter.blogspot.com/). Through the creation of the blog, we are proud to say that we are now in the position of being able to promote a wide range of social activities (organized by us as well as by other charities) taking place in Tower Hamlets and surrounding boroughs. The group of people involved in Tower Hamlets in Your Hand has also become responsible for the maintenance of

our website (www.mmwf.org),

 Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/MMWF/218705491522574)
 Twitter (www.twitter.com/mmwf).

Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/mmwf/
YouTube http://www.youtube.com/user/mmwfweb/videos

Our Achievements

Thanks to the computers and printer that we have been provided, we were able to achieve the following results:

    We have been able to involve as many as 25 young Tower Hamlets residents in the creation of a semi-   permanent editorial office.

      A blog-newsletter was created.

Our centre has become affiliated with the UK Online Centre, which puts us in the condition to provide Basic Online IT courses.

 We have been able to organize IT literacy courses for elderly people from Tower Hamlets, Newham, and Enfield (in cooperation with the Armfield Pensioners’ Club).

We have been able to provide free access to the Internet to people who do not have it in their homes.

We have been able to enhance the effectiveness of our one-to-one job-seeking guidance sessions. We can now accompany the theoretical part of the sessions with practical “show-and-tell” demonstrations of where to find/ how to take advantage of the most common job market related Internet resources.

We have already trained 76 people (44 of which have achieved some kind of certificate in IT literacy). Moreover, we intend to continue guaranteeing free internet access to all those Tower Hamlets residents interested in visiting our premises at Montefiore Centre, Hanbury Street.

www.mmwf.org

We will also continue to provide Online literacy courses for elderly people living in Care Houses/ Pensioners’ Clubs.

What you said

Below are just a few quotes from the feedback we have gotten from the participants of the Tower Hamlets in your Hands project. We would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has spared their time to give us feedback so far. Thank you!

Mr Shirajul Islam  -‘I came to know that MMWF offered various IT related activities. I found the computer lab in MMWF very comfortable and atmosphere was also very friendly. I would definitely recommend the courses and the opportunities here at MMWF to my friends.’

Ms Sumaila Aslam - ‘I have learnt a lot of exciting new things during my course thanks to MMWF and the UK online centre.

When Mrs. Nilima Howlader and Ms. K.W. Mani Nilanka Wickramathinlamka first came to our premises they had no experience whatsoever in usage of computers or Web. They also went on to join our semi-permanent editorial office, taking it upon themselves to conduct research on activities taking place in Tower Hamlets focusing on the issue of Womens Rights.

 Ms. Wickramathinlamka tells us ‘When I first heard about this project, I did not believe I would be any use in this project. However, two months into the project, I did become an important part of it. Every moment during the project, was a learning experience for me. I also enjoyed the group work aspect of it. Thank you MMWF!’

We believe one of the most crucial things in any project, is to make sure the participants are satisfied with what we are providing them. Feedback is important so that we are aware of the areas where improvements can be made.

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