The SUCCES project directly responds to the 2 Seas Operational Programme Objective a to 'Promote and allow for social inclusion and well-being of different groups in society'. The project responds to the need to improve the quality of life of the unemployed, who are facing greater exclusion due to the ongoing economic difficulties. Unemployment has increased significantly over the past eighteen months in all project partner areas. In Medway it has doubled.

By enabling access to skills, qualifications and to other complementary services designed to overcome barriers to employment, SUCCES will assist the unemployed to progress into employment. The broader impact of SUCCES will be to improve the labour market competitiveness of partner areas by up-skilling the workforce and increasing the proportion of local people accessing local jobs.

The major challenge facing the cross border area is the existence of a significant number of people facing multiple barriers to employment. (65% of people on job seeker allowance are facing multiple barriers) )The SUCCES partnership has decided to address three of them, common to the 2Seas area: A lack of mobility, Low self esteem caused by personal circumstances and a lack of skills and qualifications. S

The project provides an innovative way of responding to the needs of clients by providing 1-2-1 support accessible at neighbourhood levels in the heart of communities. At a time when a significant number of people have been made redundant due to the recession, those that are harder to reach with multiple barriers to employment are further excluded from accessing employment because they cannot compete with the newly unemployed who are more “job ready”.

The opportunity is to provide an 'especially tailored, quality and accessible' service that meets and addresses the needs of such clients and therefore improves social cohesion within our target disadvantaged neighbourhoods

The Preparation phase began in mid November 2008 and comprised a series of meetings with potential partners and work on submission which concluded in December 2009. The delivery phases on the project started on 1st February 2010 and finished on 30 June 2013. Activity 1 comprised of a series of interventions to strengthen physical, social and psychological mobility of beneficiaries. This has helped them to be more physically and emotional able to consider wider opportunities for training and employment. Activity 2 focussed on the support systems required to guide people through their adverse personal circumstances, so they can move forward and consider employment options and also helped to develop soft skills. Activity 3 focussed on creating a range of vocational opportunities for work experiences and training. The Communication activity comprised a launch and final event with yearly seminars in each delivery location to disseminate information on a local, national and EU level.

Activity 1 -(i) Contacts through street house approaches: Achieved 38007 (target 3,500)(ii) People visiting Neighbourhood Centres: Achieved 6905 (target 600) (iii) Participants in Activity 2:Achieved 1598 (target 500) (iv) taster sessions/workshops: Achieved 265 (target 90) (v) Participants in employment support/community activities: Achieved 1423 (target 300) (vi) People to start volunteering: Achieved 122 (target 70) (vii) People to gain a driving license: Achieved 65 (target 60) (viii) community groups to be organised: Achieved 196 (target 40) (ix) Mobility guide to reach harder to reach people: Achieved one guide. Activity 2 - (i) Participants in self esteem training: Achieved 766 (target 400) (ii) Soft Skills training sessions: Achieved 208 (target 66) (iii) Participants in work environment training: Achieved 459 (target 320) (iv) Training sessions in the culture of work: Achieved 111 (target 40) (v) Bike riding sessions in Kortrijk: Achieved 3 (target 3) (vi) Driving licence

Guidance sessions: Achieved 267 (target 60) (vii) Sessions to help people overcome adverse personal circumstances Achieved 1281(target 340) (viii) 2 sessions in each country producing booklet: Achieved this goal to produce booklet. (ix) 10 hours to finalise booklet: Achieved 30 hours (x) Sessions to test cross border techniques: Achieved 8 (target 4) (xi) 1 Soft Skills Guide: Target achieved (xiii) People to access monitoring: Achieved 100 (target 70) Activity 3 (i) Work Placements: Achieved 219 (target 80)

The target group of the project has been: those unemployed or those not actively seeking work who are the “hardest to reach”, namely: I) who are not currently benefiting from intensive employment support, II) who live in a deprived neighbourhood III) Who are facing one of the identified barriers to employment such as a lack of mobility or skills. IV) Who are on low incomes? V) Who have been unable to actively seek employment due to adverse life circumstances? We have taken a broad reach out approach within these groups of people, rather than targeting specific groups within this category.

In addition to our beneficiaries, we have managed to support practitioners and businesses with project services. Specifically within the territories, Norfolk territory benefitted from introducing initiatives that were intensive, face to face provisions, designed to raise confidence, soft skills, by providing an intensive provision giving beneficiaries a sense of autonomy, against a backdrop.

Whilst job outcomes was never a concrete measurable target within the project, each territory has managed to support individuals back to work, thereby contributing to helping to improve quality of life and better economic circumstances for individuals. The full range of activities across the delivery areas has helped to contribute towards a greater level of social inclusion for previous isolated individuals. The figures we have achieved aforementioned above indicate the levels to which we were successful in achieving this. Many activities of the project are sustainable as discussed in 11.6 below in more detail. For Norfolk, some of the benefits have been successfully engaging with hard to reach clients from particularly vulnerable areas of society, for example those with mental health needs, homelessness issues and those with alcohol/substance addiction misuse issues. The effects of the programme, via initiatives such as the Community Reporters scheme, have included being able to devise creative ways to overcome engagement and retention barriers for people of our target group, providing activation routes to employment and improvement of quality of life and bring them closer to the job market. Norfolk also reports that developing and maintaining beneficiaries’ self-esteem in this way has had the effect of under-pinning their future development and skills progression routes. In Medway, some of the beneficial effects we have felt centre around our ability under the project to address the wider ranging areas of adverse personal circumstances our beneficiaries found themselves having to deal with, which often prevented their longer term goals of re-entering employment. In Kortrijk, the effects of recruiting volunteers has enabled them to undertake a structured training course and undertake valuable work experience activities to move them closer to the work market.

Each partner has brought a different beauty to the project. This has been helpful because although our underlying challenges are the same, I.e., helping hard to reach people become socially activated and move towards employment in an economic downturn, our approaches have been slightly different so we have been able to learn from each other. We have shared in each other’s methodologies and not only created common cross border tools but have started to implement some of each other’s methods in our own areas. For example, Medway, since learning about Wise guys, has developed its own volunteer training scheme for volunteers, to ensure that they have an accredited qualification as well as practical mentoring training.

At Medway, SUCCES has worked closely with GAPS project, to support apprentices with further training and practical support where needed, the TEN project and ESF Eco Advantage project (providing support to businesses in improving their carbon efficiency). SUCCES has dovetailed into the Department for Work and Pensions Welfare Reform agenda, entitled ‘in work better off' - a new wave of employment support programmes for unemployed jobseekers and the UK government’s Sub National Economic Review, drawing attention to ensuring that workforce skills development is suitably demand led and focused on employers priorities. In Belgium, partners at Mentor Vzw report that they implemented the SUCCES-methodologies in their integral approach during job coaching, individual guidance counselling towards a job, activation guidance (all funded by different streams - VDAB and ESF. Also, they used some of the methodologies and tools for new projects, for example: Voortraject kwetsbare groepen (ESF), Way 2 Learn 2 Work – Leonardo Da Vinci project, started in September 2013 & customized trainings for employees of Social Economy enterprises (for example Waak in Kuurne), for beneficiaries of Public Centres of Social Welfare (for example OCMW Brugge). Our French partner Maison de l'Initiative reports that their new projects Find your place (for RSA new beneficiaries) in the first welcome & Hyphen (“Trait d’Union”) are both direct results from the SUCCES project. They also report that they continue to deliver the Feu vert driving school and the SUCCES devised to be and to behave (soft skills).

Soft Skills development is the crucial key to unlocking an individual’s full potential. Involve your beneficiaries; they are the lifeblood of your project and the long lasting key to sustainability. Communicate well - we have recognised that we could have recorded more good news stories/case studies and press releases to support our good work. Take a holistic view of a person, not just a one dimensional employment support view i.e., CV writing, job search training. You need to see the person as a whole, to appreciate their talent, challenges and the best way to help them.

As well as being clear about which partner is responsible for organising and leading on which action, gaining the attendance of participants at events can be a difficult task. This is due to a number of reasons. We found that by offering something to a specific audience that will benefit them, i.e., networking opportunities, presentations on project offers and available support, free tools to disseminate, workshops to taste and try our methodologies, we managed to secure good numbers at each event. We would encourage other projects to put a lot of effort into taking an organised approach to inviting people and following up these invitations, to ensure you have a good attendance on the day. Try to organise some higher profile attendance, for example, politicians, business leaders, who may attract a greater audience.

We have managed to launch a mini-site which will house the tools that we have made as a project, continuing to support practitioners and beneficiaries alike after project closure. The SUCCES partners have also led a cluster proposal which is based on in part, the learning and outcomes gleaned from SUCCES, so in that sense the project is sustainable as we will potentially be carrying on developing further the progress we have made on the project into a new arena to expand further with new partners. These are interventions that will lead to an increased sustainability of the project and represent transferrable methodologies for other stakeholders to adopt. Project partners have built in elements of their delivery that will be fully sustainable after the project has ended. Throughout the territories, we recruited, trained and harnessed the skills of many volunteers in our delivery activities and forged networks of partnerships which will mean that these activities can still be fully be delivered, long after SUCCES has finished.

The partnership will continue to be in touch with each other, particularly in regard to the new submission of the Soft Skills Cluster proposal. This will be a positive legacy for the SUCCES project. We are pleased to report that many of our activities have now been embedded into the local communities, largely through the use of volunteers that we have supported during the project and that some activities will continue to carry on after project closure. In relation to learning acquired, Medway has since gained a further project, IMPRESS, which is focussed on providing robust in-work support is based largely on the learning from the SUCCES project, particularly in terms of providing ongoing support to remove barriers that may mean an individual losing their employment such as adverse personal circumstances.

The project recognised that it was not only vocational skills or soft skills that helped people move towards employment and social integration, but a combination of both. however, we have learned that without the import soft skills dimensions, it can be hard to motivate/encourage people to look at skills/training/work opportunities that are available and therefore this is a crucial foundation step in any approach to helping people find work. We acknowledged that this is sometimes overlooked and can be intangible in terms of measurement. It is important to have these measurement tools and methods clearly laid out at the start of the project so that this can be demonstrated (as in the practical neighbourhood skills audit) and thus the value can be appreciated.
The tools that we have developed will be a lasting legacy of the project and will remain available after project closure on the mini-site. The partners are involved in a 2 Seas Cluster proposal based around activity 2 of SUCCES, which is the development of soft skills.