Community Action Dacorum (Dacorum)
Dacorum CVS has a staff team of 35 plus many tutors and interpreters we engage as required. In the past year our European Project activity has evolved from two staff to also engage four colleagues (who have subject relevant expertise) as part of a strategy of developing our expertise in this area. The organisation turnover is £1.6 million.
We are an adult educational provider and combine this role with community development, support and services. We deliver a range of leisure and employability skills related courses, including ESOL, Interpreter training, Beauty, Music Studio, Basic Construction, Forklift driver training, Belly dancing, Yoga and courses to support NGO’s improve their organisational capacity.
Our projects meet community needs, e.g. Community Transport, Shopmobility, Corporate Social Responsibility, Cultural Learning Project, an Interpreting and Translation Service, an Adult Career Information Advice and Guidance, Migration Integration and Domestic Violence support. Many have adult learning as an integral part of their delivery and address the needs of those facing barriers and disadvantage. We take account of needs in venue, day of the week and time, and engaging at an earlier stage with learners to ensure we address confidence barriers
We represent NGO’s in strategic and other partnerships (such as providing the Chair of Dacorum Learning Partnership) where we sit with the public and private sectors in community planning and ensuring good current service delivery. We actively engage with a wide variety of subject areas; such as European funding, economic development, social enterprise, children and young people, migrant workers, ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, older people, the environment, community safety and lifelong learning.
We use our expertise as outlined above to engage in a range of European transnational projects (as outlined below) and our ethos is that we have a story to share and many stories to learn as part of developing new ideas to develop the support we provide in our community. In developing this expertise we have built the capacity of the organisation and the number of staff who have knowledge and engagement with this area of our work.
Dacorum CVS provides ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) training for 150 students each academic year. The levels covered are beginners through to upper intermediate and within the class we have students from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds. We have six qualified tutors delivering the classes and in the last Ofsted Inspection of our funder the ESOL provision we and other providers deliver was ranked as Outstanding.
In addition we operate the Herts Interpreting and Translation Service which tutors students through to sitting the Diploma in Public Sector Interpreting (DPSI), which is the professionally recognised qualification in the UK. In the last twelve years we have trained over 600 students who are engaged as part of our providing 12,000 assignments for the public sector in areas such as health, local government and probation. In any one year we provide interpreters in over 70 languages.
