We are very excited to have launched the 2017 cohort for the Scale Accelerator Programme! This year, our second cohort is comprised of six organisations that we will support on the beginning of their scale journey. They are:
- Alexandra Rose Charity – who are helping families to tackle food poverty and support healthy eating nationally through their Rose voucher scheme, which simultaneously bolsters local food markets.
- Greater Manchester Immigration Aid Unit – who are planning to become a centre of excellence for refugee family reunification, enabling organisations across the UK to reach similar success rates for reuniting families.
- Mayday Trust – who are working to revolutionise the homelessness sector through their Personal Transitions Service model to offer an alternative to existing support services that institutionalise the problems that people experiencing homelessness face.
- Spark Inside – who provide one-to-one life coaching for young people in prisons are planning to scale across the UK and beyond.
- StreetDoctors – who want to increase the reach of their StepWise programme nationally, which empowers young people at risk of violence to learn, share and teach emergency lifesaving skills.
- WEvolution – who have brought Self-Reliant Groups to Scotland, which offer a unique environment to enable people’s economic potential through supportive relationships and learning new skills and plan to scale them nationally.
On Tuesday 28th March the teams came together in London to launch the 2017 Scale Accelerator Programme, taking the opportunity to get to know each other and hear from a great range of speakers. Groundswell, a previous Scale Accelerator participant, talked this year’s cohort through what they should expect from the programme and highlighted the need to take their whole organisation on their scaling journey. London Bubble, who have been replicating their Speech Bubbles programme for a number of years, inspired the teams with their story of how they’ve adapted in order to continue to scale up their impact.
The Social Innovation Partnership presented on the importance of evaluation and explained they will be providing teams with tailored support as part of the Scale Accelerator Programme. The School for Social Entrepreneurs ran an introductory session on Action Learning Sets, giving everyone a taste of how this aspect of the programme will work.
Finally, the event closed with an informal drinks reception where we were joined by the programme’s funders. We are excited by the potential and ambitions of the 2017 cohort and look forward to supporting them in their individual scaling journeys to achieve greater social impact across the UK and beyond.