The Oasis Community Hub Foundry & Boulton is part of Oasis Community Partnerships and have the guiding aim of transforming our local community and the inclusion of every person in that process, helping each member of the community to reach their full potential.

We work with a focus on nine core values: Compassion, Patience Humility, Honesty, Joy, Being considerate, Hope, Forgiveness, Self-control in our own behaviour and in our interactions with others.

At Foundry & Boulton we work as part of our local community to understand the issues that impact our specific neighbourhoods of Handsworth and Winson Green, Birmingham, and together to find practical ways of responding to structural injustice and inequality.
 
What we do

Our response is centred around our Food Pantries, though we also have Warm Welcome spaces, run various wellbeing courses based around art and cooking, provide one to one advocacy, run community events with local partners and provide Summer Holiday clubs with a meal for local children.

Oasis aims to have local governance and involvement in leadership from the local community to guide the work we do, and we are working to grow the team and to develop the skills for people to engage effectively in leadership of the Community Hub. This is particularly important as two new academies have joined Oasis in the area and the hub is having to incorporate the development of a community wide strategy across a wider area around the 4 academies.

We want to develop the engagement with members of the local community, to increase commitment to the aims of Oasis in the area and to encourage and grow the team of volunteers, developing skills to become effective advocates and leaders in their community.

What we are aiming to do

The three strands to what we are aiming to do are:

1: To increase engagement with members of the local community, developing their personal well-being, self esteem and confidence to participate through a series of workshops with a focus on well-being. This will include a variety of different approaches including yoga and mindfulness activities, creative arts activities for mental health and cookery and healthy eating activities.

Many people in this area face considerable barriers in communicating such as having English as a second language, experience of being disregarded by institutions, struggling with access to services and low self esteem. 

We will also increase our capacity for advocacy to help resolve some of the issues people face that are a barrier to their involvement such as struggling with poor housing, finances, access to health care.
 
2: Leadership and Training of staff and volunteers, to develop the skills needed to be able to use their existing gifts and abilities in order to contribute as leaders and enablers of community growth. Training in self-awareness, conflict resolution, developing engagement with the Oasis values and leadership and governance skills is part of this.

We value the voice and experience of our volunteers and local participants in our activities and want to equip them and build them up to feel more able to feel confident dealing with other people, institutions and organisations, ultimately so that they can take on the tasks of governance of this local charity effectively and grow the impact of local people in supporting their own community. We hope that doing this training together will also encourage our individual volunteers to become a more cohesive group and find ways to relate better to each other and to our local participants.

This will include a series of in-house training activities focussing on the Oasis 9 habits (values) and also an 8 week course with Peacemakers, with a focus on team building and personal development around communication, conflict resolution and working together.
 
3: On going training and facilitation to focus and develop the skills of local people to participate in engaging with growing a vision for their community and being advocates and effective leaders and governors of the charity, forming a “Community Action Group” to envision, guide and develop the work of the Oasis Community Hub in the area.

This will involve ongoing in-house and external training to build up the team and develop any additional skills needed. We will organise some “vision days” with facilitation to plan for the future growth and development of the work.