Social Enterprise Support Funding

Great news - We’ve secured £100,00 of funding from the Social Enterprise Support Fund to make us more financially sustainable and help set up our café. 

The funding we have secured will go towards: 

• Freeing up management time from day to day operations to focus on business development; growing income from employers, selling more Disability Awareness Training and growing other financial streams so that we become more financially sustainable. 
• Enabling us to employ a café manager to set-up and run our café in Reading, and provide them with the tools and training to provide supported employment. This is essential as they will then not only be a enable the café to thrive as a business, but be equipped with the skills to support our clients (people with disabilities) who will work there, whether in paid roles, on support internships or gaining work experience. To find out more about our café, please click here. 

Achieving these two things will mean that we can continue to support clients in work where there is no longer any funding - this includes the 119 of our current clients who are supported by our Keeping in Touch team. Our experience and national statistics tell us that without ongoing support people with disabilities are much more likely to lose their jobs. So we know that ongoing support is vital. However, despite recognising the benefits, local authorities, large funders, employers & parents alike are reluctant to pay for it. 

We’re incredibly grateful to the Social Enterprise Support Fund for recognising the importance of our work and supporting us to change lives, one job at a time. 

The Social Enterprise Support Fund provides vital and rapid financial support to help social enterprises in England focussed on supporting their communities to recover from the pandemic. The Social Enterprise Support Fund is a two-year project, delivered by Big Issue Invest, Key Fund, Resonance, the School for Social Entrepreneurs (SSE), and UnLtd, in partnership with The National Lottery Community Fund, and will jointly deliver £16.3 million in grants. 

This has been made possible thanks to The National Lottery Community Fund, the largest funder of community activity in the UK.