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.