Founder and chair of the organisation Empowering People for Excellence. Elena Noel recently received the Civic Award from the Mayor of Southwark for Voluntary Work/helping people in the community. She tells The New Londoners about her work.
I run workshops on building better community relations, I also work individually with parents whose children are at risk of being excluded from school, and I also provide support and advocacy for individuals who are unable to enforce their rights. For example, I ran workshops with the Somali Community to improve their networking and also ran workshops on Cohesion, Belonging, Diversity and Conflict with six formers at Bacon’s College which helped them to get the Gold Award for Diversity from Ofsted.
Most of the new users get referred to me by word of mouth. I’ve got good links in the local community and with the police as I’ve worked in Southwark for over 11 years, previously as a mediator.I try to address social exclusion, children getting into gangs, parental/child relationship breakdown. We try to encourage everyone to have a positive dialogue. I love it when I work with groups and see positive change. I ran workshops on stop and search with the police force so that young people understood their rights and the police built better relations with the young people. I work with faith groups and it was great to see that on the night of the riots some of these groups were on the streets advising people and calming the situation. I’ve worked with women who were victims of domestic violence. In one case, I helped a woman and her child to be rehoused after she had been living for 3 months on the floor of a community centre. She was very scared and I went with her to the Domestic Violence Officer to get support.
She didn’t seek advice elsewhere du to lack of information mainly. People don’t know where to go and who to trust. Some, like this lady, have no family and friends to turn to.
I can’t say the recent riots have had an impact on my work. There are always tensions in Southwark – some are systems issues, others to do with race and social issues. Young black people struggle to see their place in the world. I like to work with them to give them new perspectives on their situation and how they can turn their lives around.
I am organising the first South London Apprenticeships Fair for 16-25 year olds on 25th October 2011 in Liberty House, Cottage Green. We are encouraging employers, career advisers and young people to attend. The other key piece of work is a research project in to hate crimes inflicted on people with disabilities. Reporting of these crimes is very low but anecdotal conversations seem to indicate that there is a problem and that it is due to lack of awareness.
For further information go to:
www.southlondonapprenticeshipfair.co.uk
