The Nuu-chah-nulth Employment and Training Program is moving to a bright new facility at the end of this month.
Located at 4090 Eighth Avenue, the new office will become part of a service complex that includes the provincial ministries of Social Assistance and Child & Family Services, plus Service BC and the Motor Vehicle Branch.
The present office is a storefront in the uptown core on Third Avenue. NETP supervisor Andy Callicum said his agency was looking for a larger and more professional setting.
“This space wasn’t built as an office. I believe there was a hairdresser here, originally,” he said. “We’re moving to an actual office building, with more space. We’ll have two training rooms instead of one.”
The Third Avenue location makes for a great deal of walk-in traffic, but Callicum said moving to Eighth Avenue will actually be better.
“Port Alberni has some of the highest rates per capita of income assistance recipients in the province. We’ll be right next door to MCFS and Social Assistance, so we will be seeing a lot of potential clients close by each month. And for people in our driver training program looking to get their Learner’s permits, the Motor Vehicle Branch is right next door. ”
“We are really excited about this move, for a number of reasons,” employment counsellor Corinne Moore said. “We really believe it will increase our foot traffic. It’s a beautiful office – to us, comparatively, anyway.”
Moore has taken the driver training program to a number of Nuu-chah-nulth communities with available training space. Even when the sessions are in Port Alberni, however, the practice has been to take the sessions to an outside location, such as the Tseshaht Multiplex, which has excellent training facilities.
“That is because of the lack of space here. We only have one training room and multiple programs. So it should be a really exciting change. We change over on April 1. It’s a fresh start and I, for one, am very excited.”
Callicum said there wouldn’t be any changes to staff or services, but NETP is investigating better ways to serve clients.
“We’re looking at doing things a little differently when we move into our new place,” he said.
Currently, the focus is on intake-based group programs with a set number of clients, generally 12 to 15, who undergo a prescribed series of training modules and/or workshops.
“We’re working with them exclusively for two months,” Callicum explained. “I’m looking at going away from that, and have our program coordinators put their heads together and look at the all the different trainers we bring in throughout a training program.”
In some cases, different training programs such as BladeRunners and the A-m’aa-sip Essential Skills Program contain similar or even identical workshops and use the same trainers. The goal is to determine if it might be more effective to offer those sessions on an ongoing basis throughout the year rather than confining them to time-limited programs. That way, clients could acquire training on a more flexible basis.
“Any time you do an intake, you run the risk of having people drop out. It’s not uncommon to do an intake of 12 people and end up with eight, ” Callicum said. “We could potentially maximize the number of people we get trained. If we’re not doing it by intake, we could potentially fill up each session with 15 people instead of eight.”
