WYCOMBE Race Equality Council has been awarded more than +£100,000 from the Home Office to help people in the ethnic minority communities.

The council will be working with the Thames Valley Probation Service to get more black and Asian people working for the service to help them feel more "connected" with the community.

Linda King, services development manager with the probation service, said: "The probation service wants to give out the message that the people who walk though our doors are just as likely to be members of our staff as they are to be offenders."

The Home Office is putting money into a national programme called Connecting Communities, as a result of the report into the inquiry into the death of black teenager Stephen Lawrence.

More than 800 organisations put up projects and the grant to WREC is one of just 26 awarded.

Ranjit Dheer, WREC director, said the grants for projects were intended to make people from the black and Asian communities feel more "connected" because the services they received were provided by people like themselves.

Only one probation officer out of 18 working out of the Wycombe office is black.

Roger Colomb, chairman of the project management group, said the scheme would try to match the profile of the probation service and its clientele.

Zia Ullah, from High Wycombe, started in his new job running the project on Monday, full of hope as to what could be done.

For the 33-year-old former careers officer the job, based at WREC, links in well with his community work in drugs outreach and community safety.

Mr Ullah's work would not be directly involved with turning people away from crime but encouraging people from the black and Asian community to get involved in the fight themselves.

It's early days for Mr Ullah but he wants to find out why black and Asian youngsters do not look on probation as the kind of job they want to do. It's a similar problem to that faced by police forces.

He will also be looking for ethnic minority people prepared to act as voluntary mentors on the probation service's basic skills project.

About 40 per cent of people who get into trouble with the law cannot read and write. Mentors will be trained to teach them and so help them get jobs

"We have to break the cycle of re-offending," said Mr Ullah.

The grant, which is for two-and-a-half years, will also pay for research at Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College's faculty of social sciences.

The research project is headed by Paul Watts, reader in urban policy and research methods, with Shabnum Tanvir, a 23-year-old sociology and psychology graduate from High Wycombe, as his research assistant. They will be talking to probation officers, ethnic minority communities and school children to learn about their attitudes, said Mr Watts.