Decades of experience have fed into St Giles Trust’s ground-breaking model of using adult learning to ‘turn a past into a future’. The innovative St Giles London Peer Hub trains and supports its clients to achieve a Level 3 NVQ in Advice and Guidance – often the first qualification that they have ever attained.  

As part of our London Peer Hub training, all learners volunteer for six months at St Giles or a similar charity or agency, directly advising people facing situations such as domestic violence or trafficking. We provide close practical and emotional support to help learners sustain this work experience, many of whom use the industry-standard Advice and Guidance NVQ to go on to sustainable paid professional work.  

At St Giles, 40% of our staff have this powerful combination of professional training plus highly credible personal experience of the issues faced by our clients. The London Peer Hub has trained 51 Londoners in the last three years alone, and of those, we know that 27 have gone on to sustainable employment thanks to our training.   

With funding increasingly scarce, the London Peer Hub is an innovative, smarter and more impactful way to support the most marginalised Londoners. We give people who have been there themselves the professional skills and confidence that they need to be at the heart of delivering real change. This changes the culture within organisations, improves service quality, and connects those organisations better to the people they serve.