Foleshill Women's Training

Who are Foleshill Women’s Training?
How does Foleshill Women’s Training use ICT?
What difference has ICT made?
What was learnt?
How to find out more

Who are Foleshill Women’s Training (FWT)?

Foleshill Women’s Training Ltd (FWT) is a not for profit voluntary organisation. Its overall aim is to provide advice, support, guidance and learning opportunities for women in Coventry and the surrounding areas. Their ethos is to seek and provide practical and effective solutions to overcome existing and new barriers to women from all backgrounds.  The organisation is funded by NRF, Home Office, PCT, CDF-Faith Based funding and various other small grants.

FWT provides their services through a holistic approach, as the centre is managed and run by mainly female staff, who are familiar with some of the issues faced by women, particularly by those from minority ethnic backgrounds.

FWT is committed to working with women to achieve lasting improvement in their lives, in relation to economic, social and health matters, to allow them to be active participants in society.  Many of the women live in the surrounding streets and FWT is well located for young girls and women to drop into during the day.   It provides a culturally sensitive space.

How does Foleshill Women’s Training use ICT?

In January 2001 FWT received funding to become a UK Online Centre to equip a fully fitted ICT suite consisting of twenty five computers.
There is ongoing ICT training available to women starting from beginners to intermediate level. Recently one of the women participants who accessed the ICT accredited courses in the centre, has now gone on to undertake an undergraduate degree in ICT at Coventry University.
 
ICT is integrated into all of the service delivery and community development activities provided to all of the women accessing the centre and has been used in a number of innovative ways.  For example, there is a drop-in facility for local women who do not have access to a personal computer or internet facilities at home and want to search for information relating to holidays, faith and local services.

The women have also accessed their language software (5 Asian languages) to generate income for themselves by delivering a translation service from the centre to PCT and other local agencies.

What difference has ICT made?

Clearly, the use of ICT in this example has provided many positive benefits for women who may have felt marginalised due the lack of access to personal computing at home.  The FWT website is internally maintained by a member of staff who has been trained in house. A recently funded project has enabled women from Christian, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh faiths to come together and dispel negative stereotypes about each other by identifying positive female role models from each of these faiths. The culmination is a publication of positive role models of women from different faiths.  The use of ICT has been very crucial in this project as the young women have been able to use facilities to communicate with other women and email each other. The publication has been designed by the young women using the computer facilities at FWT and will be printed and sold to raise money for the young women’s support group.

What was learnt?

FWT has been delivering pioneering work over the last 15years in regeneration and in particular working with women from ethnic minorities who are not always able to access mainstream services. Since becoming a UK Online Centre, the project has been instrumental in identifying ICT barriers and overcoming some of those barriers for women from ethnic minority backgrounds.

They have used ICT facilities in a number of ways to expose women to the use of computers by integrating ICT in all their learning programmes. Most of the women prefer to learn together in a group situation, other women like to use the drop in facility and will work with a pace they are happy with.

The Employment officer is better able to support women who are looking for work with the use of the ICT facilities in preparing CVs, filling in job applications, using the net to search for particular jobs and access to more job opportunities.

Social enterprise support is also available to women entrepreneurs who have now formed a network of women entrepreneurs who support each other communicating online and offline.  Having a very local venue with ICT facilities in a neighbourhood has meant that both the young women’s support group and the Social Enterprise group were easy to set up.  A valuable lesson learnt has been to update and maintain the computers on a regular basis to provide a high quality service for all local women.

How to find out more

Foleshill Women’s Training
70-72 Elmsdale Avenue
Coventry
CV6 6ES

Telephone: 024 7663 7693
Email: info@fwt.org.uk

To find out more about UK Online centres, visit the UK Online website.