Part One…
One of the areas of social enterprise that makes our company
stand out from the crowd is our open door policy. Most social enterprises and
charities want to exist to support one cause, or one client group. Think of all
the big name charities and social enterprises that you know and you immediately
associate them with a group of people or a single issue. This is where we
differ significantly from the rest. When I was first looking to set up a social
enterprise the idea was formed alongside a group of people with lived
experience of mental health care services. Our first business plan was to run a
social enterprise that would do training and user led research on mental health
conditions. That’s all changed when we went on a visit with Social Firms UK to
an enterprise in Liverpool. It was a café in a hospital site that was run by
patients and ex patients and they offered us an informal tour and some Q&A
time with their founders. When we presented our idea for Service User Research
and Training one of them said “So you just want to make money by trading on
being ill”. It was such a simple statement but it had a profound effect on me.
Is that what we wanted? Did I spend my life defining myself by my mental
illness and my history? Most certainly not. It was later that day and evening
that my thinking completely changed. Why set up a social enterprise that was
meant to help people move forward in life and then completely focus on what for
some had been their most negative point. Was it not better to forget the
history and the labels and to start looking at what we all want from life, what
we can give, what our talents are? And from there The Healthy Hub was born. The
original business, before merger with DCE and before we created Working Gardens
CIC was all about customer service and the hospitality industry.
One month before we opened the doors for business we put a
very vague advert in the local paper and all it said was:
Do you consider yourself disadvantaged in the workplace? Do
you want support to turn your life around? If you want to know more, come to
our Opportunities Open Day” and then some details of time and venue. The day
arrived for the Opportunities Open Day, we hired a venue across the street from
our central Lincoln building and set up some information stands about the types
of jobs people could do in our business – Kitchen Assistant, Shop Assistant,
Receptionist, Conference and Banqueting Assistant, Admin Support Worker etc. In
our business plan we had said we hoped to support 48 people in the first year.
One hour before the doors to the venue was due to open we already had 40 people
queuing down the street! We had underestimated the need on a grand scale. By
the end of our 8 hour Open Day we had nearly 70 people signed up to work for
us. All of them considered themselves to be disadvantaged in the workplace but
we weren’t asking them for huge amounts of detail as to why. We asked them a
different sort of support assessment question – Why do you feel you have
struggled to get or maintain a job? The answers were many and varied but the
will was universal – people wanted to help themselves; they just needed a bit
of support.
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