Helping young people start their own businesses is a recipe for success
Read on for Striding Out's story using coaching to turn around lives and boost local economies.
NB: We usually feature our top of the table organisation however, Mow and Grow has topped the table in the past when we have featured other key sectors it works in.
FASTEST GROWERS : EDUCATION AND YOUTH
| POSITION | ORGANISATION | DESCRIPTION | REGION | TURNOVER |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mow & Grow | Community gardening enterprise which strives to improve people's lives, cut crime and provide new skills for disadvantaged people | South east of England | £151,933 |
| 2 | Striding Out | Provider of leadership, business and career coaching and training services | London | £212,000 |
| 3 | Nofit State Circus | Contemporary circus company committed to creating inspirational education and training programmes | Wales | £1,303,980 |
| 4 | Sport 4 Life UK | Charity dedicated to changing lives through the power of sport in Birmingham | West Midlands | £231,666 |
| 5 | Changemakers Foundation | A champion of young people leading their own social action and change | London | £1,800,000 |
| FEATURED NEWCOMER: | UNITY – YOUNG PEOPLE'S PROJECT | An organisation committed to improving services and activities for the young people of Stoke on Trent through creative opportunities, offering them training and advice along the way | West Midlands | £144,587 |
KEY: This table ranks the top five organisations in this sector, according to growth in turnover between last year and this year. To qualify for this ranking, organisations must have three years of accounts. The featured newcomer is chosen by the RBS SE100 Index team for being a trailblazing organisation that has been trading for less than three years.
IMPACT LEADERS : Education and Youth
| ORGANISATION | DESCRIPTION | SCORE |
|---|---|---|
| Mow & Grow | As above | 5/5 |
| Speaking Up | Advocacy and self advocacy for people with learning difficulties, mental health issues and disabilities | 5/5 |
| VIEW (DOVE) Ltd | The Dove Workshop is a friendly, informal, welcoming adult community education centre at Banwen in the Dulais valley | 5/5 |
| Cosmic | A website design, consultancy and IT. training social enterprise based in rural east Devon | 5/5 |
IMPACT LEADERS IN ASSOCIATION WITH: |
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The story of Striding Out
Striding out on her own
Taking the lead: Striding Out trained young people not in education employment and training to be youth workers.
This month's finance table runner up, Striding Out, was set up in November 2005 by Managing Director Heather Wilkinson, to introduce coaching to young people to help them develop their skills and attributes in business.
With a background in economic consultancy, Wilkinson identified a gap in the market in supporting young people to succeed in the workplace. She says: "There is a lot of unrealised potential in young people, and it is very important to find a solution to that."
Her solution is to work with young people from the pre-job stage, providing business, career and leadership coaching to bring them into the mainstream marketplace. "I think coaching is a really powerful tool" she says, "and a way of helping people, which is especially important now," referring to the current high rate of unemployment among young people.
Striding on with others
For the first two years, Wilkinson ran the enterprise alone, delivering and piloting coaching and development programmes, and building up Striding Out's reputation as a respected and increasingly well-known organisation. By the third year, she was able to employ a coach, and now, at the start of its fifth year, Striding Out has a team of 15 permanent and freelance staff and ten coaches.
Wilkinson says, "We really started growing from October 2008, when we secured a contract with Liverpool Vision, providing us with £230, 000 over four years to deliver business coaching to young entrepreneurs in Liverpool." Working with Liverpool Vision has also given Striding Out leverage to win more contracts. It now has three coaches working in Liverpool, and runs several projects in the city.
All of Striding Out's coaches are based locally to its projects. "Each coach buys into the Striding Out brand as a franchise and has their own strategy for the business," explains Wilkinson. Coaches work on different projects together, pooling ideas and resources at regular team meetings. "It is very much the strong team structure that brings people to Striding Out."
As well as Liverpool, Striding Out also runs schemes in London and Birmingham and is planning to expand to the rest of the UK in the near future. In November 2008 it launched the Future 100 awards, to recognise young entrepreneurs aged 18-35, who are leading the way in running truly sustainable businesses. It has secured a contract to deliver the Future Jobs Fund in partnership with Social Enterprise London, and is running a new youth leadership programme in Birmingham with the city council.
Striding into the future
Striding Out hopes to expand its Future Jobs contract in London – which currently puts through 40 young people a day – to the rest of the UK, and to work in delivering additional training and coaching skills to young people in London. Next year, it will be delivering two programmes to help young ex-offenders re-engage with society.
The Figuring Out career coaching programme, run in partnership with Catch 22, will provide career coaching and work placement support to male ex-offenders aged 15-19, and will link into Striding Out's Future Jobs Fund programme. A second programme for young female ex-offenders, Take the Lead, will focus more on developing the capacity for peer-to-peer support, and will work with the Youth Offending Teams in Liverpool and London.
Among Wilkinson's proudest achievements over the last four years has been the great feedback she receives from the young people she works with. Striding Out uses the client management system Salesforce to measure its impact, monitoring all its clients on its systems and collecting feedback through completion surveys, which have been overwhelmingly positive to date.
Perhaps her most important achievement has been to grow the enterprise "over and above" herself, so that it can have a wider impact than one person alone can ever create. Wilkinson is keen to stress the sustainable nature of the outcomes Striding Out works towards, by training up individuals who can then go on to work with other young people in coaching and skills. Next year's Take the Lead project shows that this sustainability is something towards which Striding Out continues to strive.
