Tackling homelessness

Invested Beyond Business winners, Power With, hope to improve outcomes for people experiencing homelessness using a novel approach. Projects are co-designed with people that have directly experienced homelessness themselves, providing vital insight. The community they are creating will have real clout when influencing policy and designing services that work.

Power With was founded by Alice Adams and Carolina Neu. Alice has worked in the homelessness sector in London as a front-line worker for over six years. She has experienced countless occasions where organisations have tried to connect with people experiencing homelessness, however, the staff haven’t had the resources, skills or confidence to do this effectively. This has led to attempts of collaboration being tokenistic and at times harmful.

Carolina has six years of experience working with communities that have been marginalised in Colombia, Peru and England. Through her experience, she believes that to bring meaningful social change, personal and collective transformation needs to happen simultaneously.

Over the next 12 months Power With aim to:

• • Create 2 jobs for people with lived experience of homelessness as co-facilitators
  • Create 20 – 40 paid and voluntary opportunities for people with lived experience of homelessness to be equal parts of design and delivery processes by working with 4 organisations that produce homelessness services and policies.

Speaking about their place on the programme, Alice explains how important the support is; “We don’t come from a business background so have limited people in our existing networks we can turn to. Investec Beyond Business is opening doors for us and providing opportunities that we never thought were possible”.

Investec Beyond Business is looking for fresh new business ideas to make the new normal anything but ordinary. You could be already trading (since July 2020), or just at the idea stage – as long as your business has a clear social purpose we want to hear from you.

Applications are open now and close 17th May 5pm.