Where did we come from?
Community Campus ’87 was formed by a group of concerned individuals who were motivated to do something about the growing crisis of youth homelessness on Teesside in the mid 1980’s. The primary aim was simply to provide housing with support, to enable homeless young people to gain the skills and experience to get and then keep their own place to live.
Realisation quickly came that homelessness was the tip of the iceberg; and there was often a whole host of other issues which needed to be addressed so that the accommodation could be maintained successfully. Young people were lacking in confidence, had low self-esteem, experienced difficult family relationships, poor emotional wellbeing, and had low aspiration and no real goals in life to achieve.
In the early 1990’s, the Key Skills Project and developed in Middlesbrough. This was borne from the purchase and renovation of our first property in 1989 – when the young people moved into the house they commented that they could have helped and in some cases done a better job. The project focused on renovating empty properties which presented a real working environment for the trainees, giving them the opportunity to gain valuable construction skills and qualifications, an opportunity to gain future employment, and once the renovations were complete good quality affordable housing.
As soon as word got round that there was a social enterprise which could not only deliver quality construction, building maintenance and painting & decorating services at a good price, but one which understood the values and needs of the voluntary and community sector demand for its service started to grow. This led to the formation of Community Campus Trading Ltd.
Over the years we have had a number of successes and achievements which are key to the services that we deliver today.