Partnerships Director Angela Sammon on why joining SBT’s Design programme is a significant opportunity for The Brilliant Club.
As Partnerships Director at The Brilliant Club, I am delighted to announce the launch of our relationship with Social Business Trust (SBT) today.
SBT is a registered charity that works in partnership with a group of leading businesses: Bain & Company, British Gas, Clifford Chance, Credit Suisse, EY, IBM, Permira and Thomson Reuters. Its mission is to support high growth potential social enterprises to scale-up their impact by investing cash grants and professional support from its eight corporate partners in a carefully selected portfolio of social enterprises. SBT works with established social businesses with revenues of c.£1 million or more that have strong growth potential.
Since 2010, SBT has provided £12.3 million worth of cash and in-kind assistance to its portfolio of organisations which tackle social issues, including 25,000 hours of high-quality business support. More than one million people have been helped by SBT’s portfolio of social enterprises since it was founded.
SBT is highly selective: it has reviewed 1,000 social enterprises to find the 21 it has worked with to date. The Brilliant Club is therefore justifiably proud that the organisation’s work has been recognised in this way. The relationship represents a significant opportunity for The Brilliant Club and we hope to see it develop into one which is long-term.
Successful partnerships are at the heart of The Brilliant Club’s success. For example, our relationships with schools and universities have made it possible for our PhD tutors to deliver academically-rigorous programmes to more than 10,000 pupils in 550 non-selective state schools in 2016/17 through The Scholars Programme.
Our discussions with SBT commenced shortly after the launch of our new five-year strategy, The Path to Outcomes, which outlines our commitment to building scale and evidencing impact. The Brilliant Club will show that we have supported 6,500 pupils from under-represented backgrounds to progress to highly-selective universities by 2021. We welcome the support and expertise of SBT in achieving this mission.
SBT is working with The Brilliant Club through its SBT Design Programme, in which successful, established social enterprises get hands-on support to create a robust business plan for sustainable growth. Securing a place on the programme is a positive indicator of our potential for further growth and we look forward to developing an expansion plan in the coming months.
SBT’s work with The Brilliant Club is being led by Hayley Hand, a Senior Consultant at EY who is on a secondment to SBT as an Investment Manager. Hayley has provided valuable support and analysis in selected areas across our charity over the past months and we were pleased to welcome her and SBT Portfolio Director Chloe Surowiec-Allison to present their initial findings at the launch of The Brilliant Club’s new academic year last week.
The Brilliant Club aspires to be recognised as delivering sector-leading impact reporting. As such the organisation welcomed meetings between SBT and our Research and Impact Department to evaluate the efficacy of our programmes. Discussions particularly focused on the impressive methodology underpinning the UCAS control group analysis.
In addition to our work with the SBT team, The Brilliant Club looks forward to sharing ideas and best practice with the other 21 social enterprises in SBT’s network. These are valuable opportunities for networking and collaboration for the organisation which we are excited to explore in the months ahead.
Click here to read SBT’s announcement on the launch of the relationship.