Invisible Cities- help us reach more communities

Aim

Train more people in our Invisible Cities: Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, York and Cardiff

Invisible Cities is an award-winning social enterprise that trains people who have experienced homelessness to become tour guides in through the UK: in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, York, Cardiff and the Scottish Borders. We employ people directly (we are a living wage employer) as well as provide tailored one to one support around things like housing, education, relationship, budgeting, addiction. etc

Our aim is three fold: 

-Support people who have experienced homelessness and be a stepping stone towards other positive opportunities.

-Break down the stigma that exists around homelessness through our walking tours

-Support our wider communities with projects and campaigns. To date we have trained 130 people and currently employ 18 guides. In 2021 we were awarded Best Community Tour in the World by Lonely Planet. 

Today, we would like to go further in our training by targeting groups that are harder to reach for us (women, people who have newly arrived in the UK amongst others) and offer them our training to build on confidence, transferrable skills but also on lifelong training.

We may be able to offer a one off training session on a specific skill (public speaking, budgeting, etc) and as we believe in leading by example this will be co-designed and co-delivered by our existing guides.

Our training will provide participants with practical, useful skills to be used in any future employment or educational opportunity or will also focus on life skills including: budgeting, conflict resolution, etc

Our aim is to identify and recruit future tour guides with Invisible Cities, thus providing direct employment and financial resilience for people. For those we may not employ, we will work one on one to signpost them to further training or employment opportunity.

Funding method

Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made