Hft Flintshire

Our Work

Hft entered into a partnership with Flintshire County Council at the end of 2017, to deliver and develop Day and Work opportunities for adults with a learning disability.

The service provides support to individuals with a range of needs and aspirations, and comprises of three delivery models known collectively as Day Opportunities:

Day Services

Hwb Cyfle is a multi-million pound purpose built day service in Queensferry, opened in 2019, and designed to meet the needs of people with profound and multiple disabilities. We support around 50-60 people per day across five activity spaces, including a workshop space, kitchen and multi-use rooms. The service has a state of the art sensory room, multiple adapted bathrooms, a changing places toilet, assisted bath, sensory garden and a café. The service provides safe meaningful activities with people attending from half a day to five days per week.

Work Opportunities

Five small business models offering focused learning opportunities, skills development and meaningful activities for people with a wide range of learning disabilities and autism.

• Abbey Upcycling – Redesigned in 2020, Abbey Upcycling is a workshop in Flint which supports up to 15 people per day. The site is split into three projects. The first is focused on bicycle upcycling; we repurpose bikes, trikes and scooters from donations and the recycling centres. These are lovingly restored by the team and sold to members of the public. The second is woodworking where furniture is upcycled for resale, alongside the repurposing of pallets to make tables, benches, home bars and bespoke items. The third is electronics where we repurpose circuit boards from electrical items to make guitar pedals.
• Hwb Dyffryn – our newest service opened in Greenfield in January 2021. The site supports up to 32 people a day across five areas. These comprise of a salon – teaching hair and beauty skills, an upcycling room – refurbishing small items of furniture and wooden goods, a craft room – creating soft furnishings, art work and cri-cut personalised items, an IT suite – teaching computer and IT skills, and an outreach group who go walking, maintain a walled garden and volunteer at an allotment.
• Tri-Fordd – This is a horticulture project based on Bretton, where we support approximately 24 people per day across three main areas; ground maintenance – a crew of people we support maintain the grounds of three large care homes across Flintshire, growing – people we support produce hanging baskets, perennials and house plants for sale, and logging – producing logs and kindling for sale from sustainably harvested trees.
• Cafés – we have two cafés based in Greenfield and Shotton, supporting six people each per day, and producing a variety of hot and cold foods for sale on site and to takeaway. People we support learn hospitality skills, cooking skills and customer service.
• Charity Shop – run in partnership with NEWCIS (North East Wales Carers Information Service), people we support sell donated items to the public, learning customer service, sales and retail skills.

Work Options

We provide support for young people and adults to gain employment opportunities within their local communities. We do this through three main routes:

• Supported employment – our employability coaches work closely with the people we support and use vocational profiling to identify their aspirations, learning needs, individual skills, former experiences and job preferences. They use this information to support people to build experience and their CVs, apply for jobs, attend interviews and ultimately gain sustainable employment. When in work our coaches support people with travel training, inductions and worksite training, and help the employer with reasonable adjustments. They will also provide long term support to the employer and the person supported to ensure long term employment is maintained.
• Supported volunteering – As with supported employment our team of employability coaches will support people to find and maintain long term volunteering opportunities with third sector or public organisations. These opportunities often lead on to paid employment.
• Project SEARCH – We work in partnership with ClwydAlyn Housing Association and Flintshire County Council to provide a year long internship programme for young people (18-26), to support their journey into work. Based in Flint within an extra care scheme, each intern has three placements over the course of the year where they work alongside a paid member of staff to learn skills and gain experience. They are supported by a full time employability coach and a tutor, who teaches L2 and L3 employability qualifications.