Olympian Sharron Davies, founder of a new website supporting parents to encourage their children to engage in community sports and Leanna Barrett, who runs the UK’s first ever Ofsted accredited fully outdoor nursery, are among the winners of this year’s Big Venture Challenge, a programme to support entrepreneurs solving the social problems we face as a nation.
Each winner will receive a year of business support, connections to help them grow and access to a £2m pot of funding to help them raise investment. The programme is run by UnLtd, the foundation for social entrepreneurs and funded by the Big Lottery Fund England.
The 40 winners of this year’s challenge will be publicly announced on Thursday 28th May, at a drinks reception at the River Rooms, Glaziers Hall, in London Bridge.
Other winners include Nikki Cochrane, former Social Media Manager at M & C Saatchi and Kathryn Tyler, former Head of Digital Communications at the Innovation Unit, co-founders of Digital Mums, a social business that trains unemployed mothers and mothers from low income backgrounds to develop skills and gain employment as social media managers, and Rosie Ginday, a Michelin star trained pastry chef whose enterprise uses its profits to provide training and employment opportunities for marginalised young people.
Business leader Margaret Mountford, who was among the judges for this year’s challenge, said: “This year’s Big Venture Challenge winners are as inspirational as ever, with huge potential to scale their ventures and make a large social impact.
“We’re particularly pleased that this year’s group features a number of innovative women entrepreneurs who are putting their talent to the task of solving some of the nation’s greatest social problems.”
Since 2011, the Big Venture Challenge has supported entrepreneurs to raise over £8m of investment and scale their social impact, with ventures on average reaching 32% more beneficiaries each year.
The programme has attracted over 70 new angel investors to social investing and many of the graduates of the previous years are now going on to raise Series A investments of over £1m.
Previous winners of Big Venture Challenge who raised investment through the programme include construction apprenticeship programme K10, Insane Logic, a language development platform for people with communication difficulties and Oomph! a provider of fun, inclusive and effective exercise classes for older adults.