ZCE was born from lunch time conversations between two colleagues and I. We have worked with people with learning disabilities for many years and like many people in health and social care we have ideas about how to better support people. In the end we decided to try and take some of the ideas forward and donated money between us to create the social enterprise and begin the first projects.
Our main aims:
- Real employment opportunities for people who otherwise find it difficult to get employment
- Building networks between organisations providing support and social care and mainstream organisations to enable efficient use of personal budgets and the best outcomes for clients
- Developing services for individuals in receipt of personal budgets to meet their needs, fill existing gaps in service provision, be truly innovative and use money efficiently
- To be self sufficient from the outset and run as a business not relying on grants or local authority funding
- To involve the people we will support from the outset and enable them to develop and manage the business, share their ideas and take them forward
If you work in social care you might have heard the phrase 'flowers, food and filth' to describe the kind of work people with learning disabilities often get offered. This refers to gardening, catering and cleaning. As I have volunteered for three years to support two gentleman with gardening micro enterprises in Bromley, I am not suggesting all work in these industries is unwelcome, but we do aim to develop more diverse opportunities. For example, we are selling plants and will employ people to manage the plants, but as we intend to do this online we want to also offer opportunities in IT and business, such as marketing. We have an open attitude towards working with others, sharing resources and finding ways to enable individuals to achieve their goals. Understanding people are individuals with different needs is key to our whole ethos.
With personal budgets rolling out across the country this is an excellent time to develop new opportunities through social enterprise. We know the best way to make the most of any funding is to work with others and create strong networks. Our focus is not on making ZCE into a large organisation, but rather to work at developing micro enterprises and tailored solutions.
We want to be successful, but our success will be measured in positive outcomes for the people we support.
Currently none of the founders or directors gain financially from their involvement with ZCE (infact we donate rather than earn money). We might reach a stage when we need to make the business our full time employment, but in the mean time we are happy volunteers.
A larger goal
As we work in health and social care we also have an interest in services for people with complex health and learning disability. We hope in the future to be able to develop services for this client group.
We are beginning with a lot of ideas, real passion and a tight budget, but we are prepared to learn as we go, work hard and celebrate all the small achievments on the way to the larger goals.
