White City Place was delighted to host the HeadStart event put together by charity group The Challenge. The Challenge is a charity set up with the purpose of helping to bring local communities together and integrate people from various different backgrounds in order to foster community trust through a number of different programmes. The HeadStart programme is an incentivised volunteering scheme that seeks to develop young people’s employability skills through various community volunteering activities as well as putting on workshops with the hope of improving its young volunteer’s chances of gaining full time careers in the future. So far HeadStart has contributed 180,000 hours of community volunteering through its members since its inception in 2014.

White City Place provided the venue for a series of workshops over the course of the morning and afternoon. The first of these was aimed at welcoming new volunteers into the programme as well as highlighting the importance of volunteering to local communities as well as personal development and the positive impact volunteering can have on confidence and personal skills. The afternoon session was dedicated to developing professional skills, paying particular attention to interview technique. This was done with the support of members of the charity’s partner Goldman Sachs who provided invaluable insight into skills necessary to secure employment such as communication, preparation and CV building.