About us
Gateway Family Services CIC is a business that excels in reducing inequalities by offering solutions to barriers in access to training, employment and community health services. Established in 2006, the company has grown exponentially and today operates in Birmingham and other areas of the West Midlands.
The company trains and employs staff where our services are most needed because we believe that local knowledge is a great advantage and that people who can relate to our service users are more likely to offer the type of support they need. We offer staff appropriate training for them to back up their local knowledge with professional accreditation, such as City & Guilds, the Royal Institute of Public Health or NOCN.
Our vision is that:
- the NHS and Social Care workforce is staffed by people who are delivering services that meet the needs of all the population.
- this workforce is made up of local people who have been supported to become skilled and employed at all levels - from support workers to professional staff; therefore the health inequalities that exist between advantaged and disadvantaged communities disappears.
In one of our services alone, the Pregnancy Outreach Worker Service (POWS), we cater for 18 separate languages with the option of using translation services when there is a language that we do not cover.
We are experts in creating roles to bridge gaps in public service delivery, offering solutions that suit the public sector besides designing and delivering accredited courses to enable people in the community to fill these positions.
We work in partnership with Primary Care Trusts, the West Midlands Strategic Health Authority, Birmingham Health and Wellbeing Partnership among others, to support their strategic decisions whilst empowering people in the community to break social, cultural and economic barriers that can cause deprivation.
Our investment in the communities has enabled us to be chosen as a Flagship Social Enterprise by Social Enterprise West Midlands - the development agency for this sector in the region. We were the only enterprise in Birmingham to be selected as part of this scheme, which is a great honour - demonstrating that our efforts in supporting communities are acknowledged by the industry.
The CIC in our name stands for Community Interest Company, which means that we are a non-profit organisation, using surplus to invest in the education, employment, health and wellbeing of the communities we work with. Our ethos has been acknowledged by RISE and they awarded us the Social Enterprise Mark, a fair-trade-like mark that is an evidence of our social ethos.
Gateway is also the host organisation for Birmingham LINk, the local involvement network for the city. Through LINk people can express their views and concerns on any health or social care issue affecting their communities. LINk is completely independent, run by volunteers. The NHS and the local authority have statutory obligations to listen to the views of LINk representatives, which can lead to improvements in health and social care across the city.
