How Stronger Voices helped us address the cost-of-living crisis correctly

Hatch Enterprise support underrepresented entrepreneurs to develop the knowledge, confidence, and skills needed to launch and grow a business. We help ensure that marginalised groups in society get the representation they deserve in the business sector because we know that talent is equally distributed across society, even if opportunities are not. 

While I may not be representative of the people we strive to work with day in and day out, our team is 50% BAME and more than 85% female. The business founders we work with leave our programmes being, on average, 90-95% more confident, more connected, and better equipped to raise the funding they need. We continuously take people from a point where they are surviving to a point where they are thriving.

The Stronger Voices Programme was suggested to me by my line manager, who had previously been on some courses with Media Trust and highly recommended it. I joined because I wanted Hatch Enterprise to be able to clarify what we wanted to say about the cost-of-living and how we could contribute as a charity without it seeming tokenistic or out of touch with immediate frontline support that continues to be drastically needed.

Highlights for me were the “eureka” moments where I felt I was really flipping the way I was looking at my charity communications on its head, and that doing so made sense. Whether that was putting greater emphasis on human, emotive stories rather than statistics, or moving to a point where we’re putting as much effort into distributing our social media content as we put into making and publishing it. I now feel in a position to move from responding to the world as it is to setting out a vision for how we want the world to be and taking other people with us on that journey.

Thanks to the Stronger Voices Programme, I was able to completely rethink the way Hatch Enterprise strategically builds bridges with the communities we seek to strengthen. It also gave me much more well-rounded approaches to communicating Hatch’s impact to the funders who help make it all possible, by really rooting our impact in the stories of the people we work with day in and day out.

I now feel much better placed to talk about Hatch Enterprise as one of the longer-term solutions to the cost-of-living crisis, as a charity that will equip people with the skills that will hopefully enable them to move from a point where they are just surviving to a point where they are thriving. 

On a personal note, this course also felt like the first time in my life where I have done something that gave me time to reflect for my own professional benefit, and I really can’t put a price on how invaluable that has been. Furthermore, I’ve since joined the Advisory Group for the programme, so I can continue to be involved! 

I can’t put a value on how important and uplifting it has been to be connected to a new, close-knit group of other charity professionals. It’s helped me see where we’re already excelling and where we have room to learn from each other and keep growing – maybe even do some exciting cross-sector collaboration.