I was all over the place last week in our big red van. We visited supermarkets all over Cornwall with our 1967 split screen camper, Scarlett, she turned some heads!

Monday we were in Lemon Quay in Truro, it was a busy day and the weather stayed nice (although a bit windy). There were a lot of tourists about and they loved the campervan. Within an hour of being there we met a previous owner of the van! He told us he had driven it around Europe in his twenties and sold it in 1971, apparently Scarlett used to be green. Despite the interest in the van the morning in Truro was a bit slow and people seemed more interested in shopping than looking for work, but by the afternoon we had 25 people signed up for help and they kept coming. We learned that the more people we were talking to the more people felt confident enough to come over and ask for help. We ended the day on 31 people, a mixture of people looking for a change of carer and looking to move to Cornwall, but only half had been affected by redundancy.

The giant Tesco’s in Redruth was our target for Tuesday. Surprisingly there was a lot more people around than the previous day and we ended up going home with 37 contacts, the majority of which we were able to help. There was a different atmosphere in Redruth; people were approaching us left right and centre. The large meat packing factory across the road had recently made 140 redundancies and was planning on making more, so we met a lot of their employees that were happy to see us. We showed them the map we had made of all of the back to work programmes available in Cornwall and they were exited to get hold of a copy of it, most were completely unaware of what services are out there.

Wednesday was Penzance, and there was just the two of us, we parked up next to the entrances of Tesco’s and Morrison’s and from what we saw most people in Penzance were happily in work or very happily retired. We may have only left with 14 cards filled out but we did make some use full contacts. While we were there we met a lot of people who were involved in getting people back to work, people that seemed very interested in working alongside us.

St.Austell was our spot for Thursday. We parked up outside the entrance of Tesco’s but it had decided to rain, so we set up in the foyer. This paid off as it meant we could grab people as they were trying to stay warm and dry inside! We went home with 36 people’s contacts and a valuable lesson for our last day. People need to be pushed to get involved. At least half of the people I spoke to that day were in desperate need of help and even though they had seen our signs they had walked strait past us. When I stopped them on their way out they were happy for the help and got involved. When I asked them why they hadn’t stopped half the people said they thought we were a recruitment agency and the other half thought we were part of the Job Centre, all of them thought we wouldn’t be much help. So we left St.Austell with a battle plan for Friday, stop everyone, because no one will understand what we are offering until we explain it in detail.

We got to the ASDA at Bodmin at about 10 and parked up outside again, there was four of us helping and a constant stream of people coming in and out. We stopped everyone we could and it paid off, we came home with 57 people’s contact details. When we stopped people we asked them if they knew any family or friends that might want some help, and when pushed to think about it most people knew someone. Mothers, wives and daughters signed up a lot of people, which is valuable when it comes to finding people that are most isolated. Most importantly of all we were close to an industrial estate where several factories had closed down or made redundancies. We took the details of the workers we met and handed our contact details for them to hand out to their colleagues that also wanted help.

After the week was through we had over 150 people to get in touch with and had handed at least another 100 people our contact details, but most importantly we spread the word about New Work. With any luck all the people that spoke to us are now spreading the word to their family and friends that there is someone out there offering help that’s a bit different to everything else around.

Take a closer look at what we were up to here... http://www.flickr.com/photos/sea-communications/sets/72157624106751946/ ...