HeadBox has partnered with St Mungo’s to help provide Space to those who need it most. 

In 2017, it was estimated that almost 5,000 people slept rough on any one night in England. This number has increased by 169% since 2010. St Mungo’s is on a mission to ensure that everyone has a place to call home and can fulfil their hopes and ambitions.
As one of the largest providers of Outreach services for people who sleep rough in England, St Mungo’s work tirelessly to offer a route out of homelessness, towards recovery.
We want to help with this recovery process and some HeadBoxer’s have volunteered their time to work at the St Mungo’s Digital Inclusion Centre to run digital workshops on various topics, including Excel, LinkedIn and coding. 

LinkedIn

Our digital workshop for St Mungo’s on LinkedIn was all about setting up your own page on LinkedIn, the professional network. We think this would be an extremely useful tool to get to grips with as it will enable them to find employment, promote their own businesses and make valuable connections.

Cathy our Head of People helped on the session and had some amazing feedback:

“I loved the fact that there was a wide range of clients who attended – some who didn’t have an email address, to others who had written their own poetry book and wanted to tell the world!
No matter what their backgrounds were, they were all there to be engaged and learn something new. I genuinely felt that the clients thought the session was worthwhile and that they learnt the power of LinkedIn and how it may be able to help them build their profile or search for jobs.
It’s always a great feeling when you know you are helping someone get that one step closer to finding a job or educating them on something they didn’t previously know.”

Excel

Excel gets the better of all of us sometimes and it’s a complicated programme to use yet one that is part and parcel of everyday professional life. From simple date presentation to using complex formulas, Excel is a must. Josh and Cam from HeadBox led this session with the St Mungo’s clients and they tested their learning with different tasks, formulas and mini projects, hoping to provide useful learnings for every client. 
Cam, one of our Business Development Managers who helped out on the Excel course, said:

“It was a great day at St. Mungo’s looking at the capabilities of Excel. It was really rewarding to see how the skills we were working on could be applied to everyday life and hopefully make certain aspects of their life easier.”

Josh, our Product Designer shared his thoughts about the coding workshop too:

“It was really fun and satisfying to conduct an Excel Workshop with St Mungo’s. As we progressed through the tasks it was great to see the participants engage with the material, ask related questions and successfully complete exercises. After learning the fundamentals, one individual even created a spreadsheet that she could use in her own life. Another participant used Google to learn new functions without any help. It was a lovely, all round experience and I hope Excel now feels a bit more accessible for everyone.”

Coding

Coding is a skill that’s highly employable and with technological advances, more and more jobs are opening up in the field. So, some of our Engineers and Developers could run some coding workshops with St Mungo’s to teach their clients what it’s all about.

With a mixture of HTML and JavaScript, we ran workshops that taught St Mungo’s how to write and run a script in order to perform a specific action.

Gavin, our Head of Technology ran a workshop and he loved it, he said:

“Not knowing quite what to expect, or how to best judge the content, we decided to begin with creating a simple calculator in JavaScript. What seemed like a fairly mundane task seemed to really pique interest in what was possible, and it wasn’t long before the participants were changing it to make it add, subtract, and divide, before moving onto the next challenge of making a ball bounce around the screen. It was incredibly rewarding to see how engaged the participants were, and how excited they got when they realised what they were capable of.” 

He was joined by Tom, our Lead Front End Engineer who said:

“It was really great to work with different individuals and help them upgrade their skills. Technology touches everyone’s lives and it is important to be inclusive and empower people so that they can really benefit from this.”

 
HeadBox is helping St. Mungo’s in lots of different ways too. To find out more visit our Social Mission page here. Up next, George from HeadBox is running an Ironman on the 14th July to find out more read his blog or you can donate to St Mungo’s here.