Millwall Community Trust’s Divert Officer Steven Chitolie explains his journey as well as what his ambitions for the role entail.
You can read his answers below…
Steven, can you tell us a bit about yourself please?
I'm Steven. I've worked in Employability now for around 3 years. I've worked in conjunction with the JCP for a company called Maximus.
We were helping those people who have been out of work for around 9 months, find new opportunities, jobs, education, and training to find opportunities in the community, retail and jobs that were available, to try and get them back into work, supporting them in any way that I could, well-being support, education and training just to try and find the qualifications they needed to go on to find some opportunities and jobs.
What are your aims and objectives in your new role here at Millwall Community Trust?
I genuinely believe that everyone deserves a second chance. I know when I was young, I made a lot of mistakes. Luckily for myself, I never fell foul of the law. But today, we come across a lot of people who are criminalized.
I'm really proud of the job that I do. I think that, a lot of people have missed out on guidance. They may have not had strong family relations. They may not have committed at school, or found school and academia difficult. So it's very easy for them to fall by the wayside of, I suppose, general society.
My job is to immerse myself in all things Millwall, all things employability, and offer these kids an opportunity, again, finding, training, education, and jobs.
What are you looking forward to most about the role?
I'm really proud. I'm actually really proud to do the the role.
The idea of giving someone a second chance is huge. If you alienate people, you criminalize people, you take them away from general society. And once you do that, there's kind of only two ways that you go, isn't there, really? And most of them are down.
It's a downward spiral. So if we can provide them just a glimmer of something that they may be interested in, hopefully, they won't be in trouble with the law again. So for me, the aims of this job is to provide those pathways for those children.
