Social Enterprise Support Funding

Laura Shuttleworth • April 4, 2022

We’ve secured £100,000 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. 

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By Laura Shuttleworth • January 16, 2023

When Rajpal first became a client at Ways into Work he had been struggling with looking for work and a good job match. Rajpal has a mild learning disability and mental health issues and had not worked for over ten years except to help now and then at his family’s supermarket. He had not worked for such a long time as he was not well enough to think about his career and life choices. When he joined Ways into Work as a Job Seeker and was assigned an Employment Coach who spent a long time getting to know him, doing a vocational profile and job matching. It was decided that the best first step was for Rajpal was to experience what different jobs and roles are like and what they would entail. Ways into Work then supported him in applying for various roles in retail and did mock interviews where he gained lots of practice. He secured a few interviews but was not offered any of the jobs. Rajpal had begun taking an interest in going to the gym and informed his Employment Coach that he would like a job at the gym. After approaching the employer, his Employment Coach secured an interview for him. He was so happy that at the interview when asked why he would like to work at the gym, he pulled out of his pocket a handwritten lengthy list of reasons why he liked the job and the skills he had to offer. This showed the employer his passion for the job and Rajpal was offered the job, working 3 days (24 hours) a week to begin with. As the leisure centre was 7 miles away, his Employment Coach supported him with applying for Access To Work transport to and from work. They also taught him and his parents how to claim his monthly ATW transport and supported him with the change of circumstances in his benefits. When Rajpal first started to work at the Leisure Centre he solely worked in the gym and his role included ensuring that all the equipment was working and clean, as well as dealing with lots of customer enquiries. This was quite a challenge for Rajpal to begin with, as it was a large premise and no two days were the same. With Job Coaching , Ways into Work was able to support Rajpal by helping to create a routine for him and also discussing with his supervisor a way of building new tasks into his days as the weeks progressed.

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