During the years of our development of the recovery community, we have been committed to ensuring that members of the recovery community have opportunities to develop and benefit from paid work opportunities when grants become available.
We currently have three apprentices working with the Serenity Cafe project, who will also be undertaking our SVQs in Community Development.

 

The apprentices have led a range of work:

Serenity Cafe women’s group
Serenity Cafe arts: supporting volunteers who lead drama, choir and guitar groups
Volunteer planning and mentoring 

Principles
We apply these principles in our work

• We believe in quality practice and set a high standard for apprentices to achieve in time
• We believe apprentices should be able to progress into a wide range of professional roles on leaving Comas, with equal standing with other professionals

Reflections
We have learned a lot during the last six months of working with apprentices:

• Many volunteers are ‘unconsciously incompetent’ when they decide to become involved in community development – they have no idea of the skills, thinking and understanding that lies behind good community development practice. Role models and experienced practitioners have to spend time making their thinking and practice explicit for apprentices to follow. We cannot assume they will pick it up by osmosis
• Making a transition from friend and peer to paid staff can be a challenging transition in many ways, which needs support and time to actively reflect on the change
• We are working with some volunteers who have never worked, or never worked without substances affecting their perceptions. We have found we cannot take for granted good ‘work habits’ and routines. All of our systems and procedures have had to become explicit. To help with this, we also developed a performance management framework which makes the values and behaviours of our organisation explicit so people know what good work habits look like. (See this here)
• We are a small organisation and with hindsight, we would advise delaying taking on apprentices until there is a critical mass of experienced staff to provide support, role modelling, opportunities for shadowing, and direct support and supervision. Nevertheless, sometimes living the principles is important, waiting until something can be perfect before attempting it is a recipe for never getting started at all.