WECIL is an award-winning organisation supporting disabled people to live the life they choose. Based in Bristol, they are user-led and use personal and lived experience to challenge the barriers to independent living, through the delivery of high-quality support and advice.
The organisation provides varied support for disabled people, from helping them into employment, to offering them benefits advice and their enterprise arm, called Disability Inc that helps businesses to support any disabled people they engage with, through training, consultancy and accessibility support.
WECIL has recently received support from Workforce for the Future, a fully-funded programme which offers skills support to businesses and organisations across the West of England.
“The first engagement we had with Workforce for the Future, was organising some training for our Senior Leadership Team,” explains Kinny Chinangwa, Business Support Services Manager at WECIL. “We completed courses for free such as Effective Team Member Skills, Certificate in Leadership & Management and Certificate in Leadership & Team Skills, which gave us ideas and knowledge to implement back into our organisation and upskilled our existing workforce.”
As well as specific training for staff members, as part of Workforce for the Future, WECIL also had access to a range of free, informative workshops on a variety of topics.
Kinny continued, “Some of our team members have attended several of the online HR focussed workshops, which have been run every month on different relevant topics. They’ve all said they’ve been fantastic and I know they’re starting to implement some of the things that they've learned from them – even advising others to attend if the chance comes around again.”
Knowing that they were skilled in what they did, WECIL’S Business Skills Advisor, Barry Tugwood, also put the organisation forward to deliver a workshop on the programme themselves because he felt that it would be an excellent opportunity to share their important work with other businesses.
“We had discussions about creating a workshop that would fit into their current programme of events, with Project Manager, Hannah”, explains Kinny. “We decided to go with the subject of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion within the workplace and will be looking at topics such as access to work, reasonable adjustments for disabled members of staff, the social model of disability, and language and communication. We want it to be a space for people to be able to ask questions without feeling uncomfortable and we’re looking forward to discussing those elements and hearing from businesses about their experiences. It’s a great opportunity for us to share our work wider and it wouldn’t have happened without the Workforce for the Future programme.”
Kinny continued, “I would definitely recommend the Workforce for the Future programme. Take advantage of the free support on offer to you as an organisation – our team have benefitted from learning about new tools and ideas we can use in our own workplace to make processes more effective and efficient, and we will definitely benefit from this going forward. It’s also brought about great opportunities for us and we’re thrilled to be involved as a provider and we're looking forward to delivering the workshop this week.”
To find out more about WECIL, you can visit their website here.
Business West is delivering Workforce for the Future on behalf of the West of England Combined Authority in collaboration with other regional partners.
Workforce for the Future provides fully funded tailored, in-depth support for SMEs across the West of England to help ensure they have the access to the training and support that they need to thrive. Businesses will receive support from our expert partners to ensure they can identify ongoing skills needs, attract and retain talented people, access the right training and development, and invest in their current and future workforce.
For more information on Workforce for the Future, please visit the West of England Growth Hub. The Growth Hub is the West of England Combined Authority’s dedicated business support service which offers free, one-to-one advice and guidance for SMEs.
Workforce for the Future is an £8m programme – co-funded by the West of England Combined Authority and the European Social Fund (ESF). The programme has received £4m of funding from the ESF as part of the 2014-2020 European Structural and Investment Funds Growth Programme in England.
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