Your church or group can fight unemployment

Job clubs have limited value when unemployment is high. How can your church or community group create new jobs, at no cost apart from a willing volunteer?

Unemployment can be devastating. It happened to me in the 1980s just after my wife had given up work to have a baby and we’d moved to a new house with an excitingly high mortgage. There was just one week’s notice and no redundancy payment.

Many churches and other community organisations are involved in job clubs. When unemployment is low it’s a great way to help people get back into employment. But what if the jobs are just not there and there are dozens of excellent candidates for every role?

That’s where the free Mind Your Own Business workbook comes in. For individuals without a job, it enables them to create a vacancy exactly tailored to their skills and interests, where they are the only candidate. The workbook helps identify the right business for them and then test whether its viable, before they put any money into it.

The trouble is, going self-employed or setting up a small business can be lonely and requires motivation. Being part of a small group going through the workbook together provides support and encouragement. All it needs is one person to facilitate a regular gathering (Zoom or in person where allowed) to discuss each section of the workbook or each podcast and to take the suggested actions.

Could you or someone from your church or community group or job club give this a go?

When I was made redundant I was offered a job, but I turned it down. This was mainly because God told me to. Not that I was very happy about this at the time. But also being dependent on one employer seemed too risky; instead I became self-employed, spreading my work across many employers. Thirty years and five businesses later I have helped create hundreds of jobs and no longer need to work. But I enjoyed creating the Mind Your Own Business resource back in January and it feels as though post Covid its time has come.

The workbook and other resources are available here: https://mindyourownbusiness.uk/resources/