In a week when our new Board of six Non-Executive Directors are being fully inducted, it feels like a pertinent moment for some myth busting.
When people misconceive what we do my first reaction is to take offence. My second is to assume I’ve done something wrong. Granted, we’re complex, accomplish a lot and not everyone is living and breathing it. So the lovely Jordan Domin had the great idea of doing some myth busting about who we are.
Here goes:
- We work with people of all ages. In fairness we started out working with young people and the majority are still under 35. However, we have delivered tenancy training to people with ages ranging from 17 – 62.
- We’re a for profit limited company. As a Community Interest Company we are asset-locked and 100% of our profit goes back into the mission to prevent homelessness. We have paid Corporation Tax every year since we started.
- We have no core funding. Passionate about being a social business, rightly or wrongly I set us up with something worth selling to meet a social need. This started out with commissions worth a few hundred pounds during which I worked two jobs. Slowly these have grown until Covid19 struck.
- We don’t encourage donations. As we’re not a charity we prefer to sell our services as business to equal business. This is congruent with our values of equality and developing independence. We think people deserve a ‘hand up’ and not a ‘hand out’ and as a business I take the same approach. Naturally this gets hard when people want to donate, something we reneged on during lockdown to get through the tough times – and we are incredibly grateful for those that saw us through whilst we build the next phase.
- We work anywhere! The beauty (and risk) of being a social business is that we’re not reliant on core funding and funders telling us what we can and can’t do. As such, if we receive a commission from the other side of the country, and it stacks up on mission and finances, we’re in!
I’d love to know what, if any of these were a surprise to you.