Expanding our migrant business support service in Birmingham
We are thrilled to announce we have received funding to expand our entrepreneurship set-up support service in Birmingham, through a partnership called Pathways to Enterprising Futures with CRÈME at Aston University, Citizen’s Advice and Punch Records.
Keep reading to discover how this funding will help us reach even more people from a migrant background, and help them to cultivate the enterprise skills needed for successful businesses and careers.
The Pathways to Enterprising Futures project is a partnership with CREME at Aston University, Citizen’s Advice and Punch Records working to deliver an innovative service to open pathways and support enterprise skills for communities in Birmingham. The project will help nearly 200 people from diverse communities gain the tools they need to pursue their employment or start up a business.
What will the project do?
Through this project, we will engage with diverse communities to offer both entrepreneurship and employability support and skills training through our entrepreneurship facilitators and job coaches.
We will listen to what our service users really want to do with their lives, spending time with them to appreciate what they want to get from the project to understand where their ambitions lie. Listening and consultation is at the heart of our entrepreneurship service.
Our business support services will include one-to-one tailored employability and entrepreneurship support, community meetings and online events. These services are all tailored to make sure our service users are listened to and have their personal aspirations at the heart of a personalised support plan.
Who can apply?
We are pleased to be able to offer our services to an even wider cohort through the Pathways to Enterprising Futures Project, helping the wider Birmingham community. Our services are open to anyone living in the Greater Birmingham area, but we are particularly looking for applications from refugee and migrant communities, women and those who are long-term unemployed.
Building on our existing Migrant Business Support programme for refugee and migrant communities, this project will offer sensitive tailored support for diverse communities in Birmingham. We know that mainstream support services are often not designed to support the specific issues faced by our communities, including: lack of trust, language barriers and access to finance.
We are particularly interested in taking a gender-sensitive approach due to the imbalances in entrepreneurship in our society. According to the Rose Review of Female Entrepreneurship (HM Treasury, 2019), only 1 in 3 UK entrepreneurs are female, a gender gap equivalent to 1.1 million businesses. On top of this, women are 20% more likely to cite necessity rather than opportunity as the motivation for starting a business (Women’s Entrepreneurship 2016-2017, GEM 2017). We want to provide a gender-sensitive service that enables women to pursue the direction that is right for them.
Want to find out more?
Contact Julia at Julia.dixon-barrow@ach.org.uk
