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 prepared to raise the funding they need. We take people from a point where they survive to a point where they thrive.

My line manager suggested I apply for the Stronger Voices Programme; they had taken some courses with Media Trust in the past. I joined because I wanted Hatch Enterprise to clarify our message on the cost of living crisis, and how we could contribute as a charity without it seeming tokenistic or out of touch with frontline support.

Highlights for me were the “eureka” moments where I felt I flipped the way I was looking at charity communications on its head. I learned to emphasise human, emotive stories on top of statistics, and put in as much effort into distributing our social media content as we put into making and publishing it. I now feel Hatch Enterprise has a a vision for how we want the world to be, and how we can take other people with us on that journey.

Thanks to the Stronger Voices Programme, I was able to completely rethink the way Hatch Enterprise builds bridges with communities. It also gave me a much more well-rounded approach to communicating our impact to the funders who help make it all possible. We now root 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. I can show how we give people the skills that will hopefully help them thrive. 

On a personal note, this course gave me time to reflect on my career, and I really can’t put a price on how invaluable that has been. What’s more, I’ve since joined the Advisory Group for the programme, so I can continue to be involved. 

I can’t overstate how important and uplifting it has been to connect to a new, close-knit group of other people in the charity sector. It’s helped me see where we’re already doing well, and where we have room to learn from each other and keep growing – maybe even do some exciting collaboration.