THE PLATFORM PROJECT SECURES £36,500 TO WORK WITH MORE YOUNG PEOPLE IN SWINDON

Swindon’s 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 during COVID-19, to meet additional demands, change the way they work, make their spaces COVID-secure and manage liquidity during the next six months.

Founder of The Platform Project, Sadie Sharp said: “The rate of youth unemployment has dramatically increased during f 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 skill set 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 the 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, secured a funded office in The Workshed, then 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.

To find out more about The Platform Project, or to volunteer as a mentor, visit: www.platformproject.co.uk

*Nationally, five social enterprise support agencies have come together in partnership to deliver the fund. Big Issue Invest, The Key Fund, Resonance, the School for Social Entrepreneurs (SSE) and UnLtd will jointly deliver £18.5 million in grants, with support from CAF Venturesome, the Young Foundation and Ashoka. This has been made possible thanks to The National Lottery Community Fund, the largest funder of community activity in the UK.