What’s next for Leaps & Grounds?

We are thrilled to announce that after running a successful pilot this year, the Innovation Hub will continue to develop Leaps & Grounds throughout 2022.

We’re therefore on the lookout for two superstars to join our team (Senior Innovation Officer, Innovation Officer — closing date 9th Jan). Together they will take Leaps & Grounds to the next level, continuing to develop, test and scale the social enterprise over the next year — a fantastic opportunity to gain experience managing and scaling and new social enterprise.

Interested in joining the team? Find out more below …

What is Leaps & Grounds?

Founded in 2021, Leaps & Grounds is a speciality coffee social enterprise supporting refugee women to take steps towards their dream careers. We provide paid work experience on our coffee cart and regular one to one mentoring so women can build the skills, confidence, and knowledge they need to start building a new career.

What have we done so far?

We worked closely with service users, industry experts and potential customers to design and test the new concept. Our testing phase culminated in a 9-week pilot — here we operated a ‘real life’ coffee cart outside our London HQ and provided 4 refugee women with over 360 hours of paid work experience. The pilot was a huge success, and we learnt a lot! We continuously tested and improved the concept based on these learnings and proved that it met service users’ needs and had the potential to be financially self-sustainable.

Sneak peek of our results:

- 1 participant has secured a job and another secured a place on a higher education course as a direct result of the programme

- 100% of participants said the programme increased their confidence

- 100+ regular customers

- Customer feedback: ‘This is the best cappuccino I’ve ever had in London’

- Participant feedback: ‘The project has been life-changing’

Read our previous blogs to find out more: Introducing the Refugee Social Enterprise project; Wrapping up discovery; Ideation Sessions; Supporting people into work through innovate social enterprise models; Validation bingo: testing big ideas bit by bit; Testing; Beyond the Multidisciplinary Team

What’s in store for 2022?

This is a really exciting time to join the project, you will have the opportunity to build on the great foundations already in place and develop Leaps & Grounds into a fully operational social enterprise. We have big ambitions for Leaps & Grounds and are looking to scale fast. Plans for next year include:

- Launch a new and improved permeant coffee cart at our UK HQ in London

- Test and open a 2nd location in London

- Expand product lines

- Test a pop-up coffee cart events model

- Run 4, 12-week Leaps & Grounds employability programmes. (20 refugee women supported, 2080 hours of paid work experience, 520 hours of mentoring)

However, as with all innovation projects our plans aren’t 100% set in stone, they will adapt, and change based on what we learn throughout the next few months.

Questions?

Contact Alice at leapsandgrounds@redcross.org.uk