Swindon & Wiltshire News
Project secures grant to help young people into work
Swindon-based youth development firm The Platform Project has been awarded a grant of £36,500 from the Social Enterprise Support Fund to help more young people improve their employability prospects.
The fund provides essential financial support to help social enterprises meet additional demands, change the way they work, make their spaces Covid-secure, and manage liquidity during the next six months.
The founder of The Platform Project, Sadie Sharp, said: “The rate of youth unemployment has dramatically increased during Covid-19, and the demand for our services has skyrocketed because there is even more competition for the reduced number of jobs.
“Our project helps young people improve their confidence and employability prospects by experiencing how to run a youth-led business and work for themselves. This will really make their skillset and CV stand out on applications.”
This funding is enabling The Platform Project to run sessions during the week, so young people can take part in work experience on various projects including:
- a youth magazine
- a printed goods business
- a digital media marketing agency
- a creative careers start-up service
Sadie said: “This funding means the world to us and we were thrilled to find we’d been successful as it shows us that our approach has a lot of potential to help with the COVID recovery.
“Scaling up is a challenge for every business, but now we can move forward with the confidence that we have funds to support the increasing number of young people within our project over the coming months.”
The Platform Project has just celebrated its third birthday and, since starting as a volunteer-led organisation, has tripled in size each year, with its income now at around £70,000 and helping around 60 young people each year.
It started small and moved around community centres until 2018 when, with sponsorship from Nationwide Building Society, it secured a funded office in The Workshed, before the project moved to their own youth-led shared workspace in Dorcan.
Today, Sadie heads up the organisation with a commercially savvy board of directors. She also helps other organisations embrace entrepreneurial capabilities through her speaking, publishing and consultancy work.
