“There were a lot of times when I felt depressed and lonely. I was so grateful to get this job. It’s boosted my confidence, helped me make friends, improved my English and importantly, earning an income means I can now support my daughter.”
Anastasia, one of Spring Action’s employees, talking about the difference it has made to her life since she began working for the ground breaking cleaning business six months ago.
Setup by Coventry Refugee and Migrant Centre in April 2016, staff at the charity identified the need for the social enterprise after finding people they worked with struggled to secure work, despite having the skills suitable for vacancies.
Uyiosa Osawe, Manager at Spring Action said: “Because refugees and migrants can’t provide examples of UK based experience or references, they often get rejected from roles that they could easily do. Spring Action was setup to solve this.”
This business model has worked and it now offers cleaning services to 14 customers across Coventry including Citizens Advice Bureau, Positive Youth Foundation and Fargo Village. Voluntary Action Coventry is another of its customers and said: “Our cleaner is brilliant, very reliable and undertakes a professional job ensuring health and safety is maintained. She communicates any problems to us promptly and is friendly and helpful in undertaking additional cleaning tasks.”
This business helped Spring Action to provide 5,000 hours of paid work to ten cleaners in 2018. Each cleaner goes through a thorough vetting and training process to ensure they can do the job.
Uyiosa aims to secure new business in 2019 so that Spring Action can employ more people. He said: “We offer commercial, domestic, end of tenancy and deep cleans and are excited to be entering into the next phase of growing our business and increasing our social impact.”
For more information on Spring Action, visit: https://www.springactioncleaning.co.uk/.