Partnerships

Job Futures is forges links with other other employment services agencies, universities and government to bring together knowledge, resources and skills to better serve Australia’s most disadvantaged job seekers.

Youth Mentoring Partnership

Job Futures has partnered with Dusseldorp Skills Forum, The Smith Family, Big Brother Big Sister and the Commonwealth Department of Family, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, to create the Youth Mentoring Network. The aim of the partnership is to work with interested organisations and practitioners to foster the growth and development of high quality mentoring programs for young people in Australia by providing a national base of collaboration, support, guidance and expertise. www.youthmentoring.com.au

Employment Retention and Advancement (ERA) Project

In 2007 Job Futures secured funding through the Helen Macpherson Smith Trust to conduct a pilot ERA project. We are delivering this pilot in Partnership with our member - Djerriwarrh Employment and Education Services. The pilot is based at Djerriwarrh’s Craigieburn and Sunbury sites in Victoria, with an ERA project manager employed to deliver the pilot.

The pilot was developed to provide intensive support and individualised assistance to long term unemployed job seekers helping them to make a successful transition into meaningful and long term employment.  Importantly the pilot will focus not just on the attainment of a job but the attainment of a job which has the prospect of training and advancement.

Key objectives: 

  • Break the ‘low pay/no pay cycle’
  • Improve job placement services
  • Improve training opportunities for disadvantaged job seekers
  • Provide longer term treatment for barriers to work
  • Reduce in-work poverty through employment advancement opportunities
  • Provide an example of a successful program intervention assisting disadvantaged job seekers and to influence welfare to work policies
Job Futures and Djerriwarrh are working closely to make this pilot a success.
Australian Social Innovation Xchange Partnership

Job Futures is actively seeking to build new partnerships with relevant organisations aimed at increasing our capacity to deliver excellent and innovative services and so better assist our job seekers, employers and local communities. Job Futures recently committed to participation in a pilot program with Innovation Xchange (IXC). IXC is a non-profit, global knowledge network which delivers the ground breaking IXC Intermediary Service - a new way to find connections and develop partnerships.

An IXC Intermediary will work with Job Futures and some of its members, helping us to better understand our capabilities and needs and connect us to external opportunities and resources. The Intermediary can be likened to a go-between, connecting Job Futures to other organisations that may be able to assist us to, for example, improve our business processes and communication, introduce innovation and expand services.

IXC has previously only worked with the private sector; our involvement in the pilot will explore how applicable their ‘Intermediary’ model would be to the field of social innovation. Job Futures will be working with ASIX in the creation of a “network of networks” that links people and organisations interested in, and actively engaged with, social innovation in Australia.