Launchpad is the ventures arm of the Young Foundation.

Launchpad develops promising ideas into new social ventures - and supports social entrepreneurs who approach us with promising ideas - by providing early stage funding, social capital and entrepreneurial expertise. Ideas are selected for their potential to achieve high social impact through a new innovative, scalable and sustainable venture. This might be as a business, social enterprise, non-profit or public institution. We also work closely with policy makers, the public and private sector to build markets and form partnerships for our ventures.

Our Projects:

Health Launchpad

The aim of Healthy Incentives is to develop and administer a reward scheme to encourage and support people to lead healthy lives. The programme will work with people to discuss and understand their health goals, and will support and reinforce existing opportunities for healthy behaviour provided either by the PCT or by other organisations in the community. If the project is successful, the plan is to roll it out nationally, offering it as a service for other PCTs to commission.

Neuroresponse is a social enterprise that will offer a new model of care for people with Multiple Sclerosis (and in due course other neurological conditions). The neuroresponse service combines a telehealth / telepresence service for outpatient visits, telephone-based nurse-led triage, and a concierge service. The venture is led by an MS nurse consultant, and is based on insights from her clinical work.

Supportmyparent.com While there are a number of services to provide direct support to older people in times of acute crisis, and support services for dedicated carers, the large group of adults who provide occasional or non-residential care to elderly parents has been overlooked. We believe this group is large, and has a major part to play in delivering care to older people. We propose setting up a web-site to enable peer-to-peer support for the millions of adults who experience anxiety and stress over their parents' ageing.

Maslaha aims to address a clear need for an accessible and authoritative source of practical information for those living in and working with the Muslim community. The health strand aims to tackle underlying causes of poor access and poor management of illness which can arise from distrust and misunderstanding of faith related issues.

Living Together with Dementia is a mental health intervention, which develops new tools to help relationships between people with dementia and their partners and families. It aims to improve communication and understanding, reduce stress and enable them to live independently together for longer. The end goal is to design a training package that can be rolled out nationally and delivered by frontline mental health and social care staff.

Start Again Football is a social enterprise that in its first eighteen months of life has already helped over one hundred young people. It provides customised support in the form of exercise, community re-integration and employment opportunities to young people with mental health issues. The aim is to encourage young people to regain control of their lives and re-ignite a sense of purpose and wellbeing.

Saheli is a three year old health and fitness service run by and for local women in Balsall Heath, Birmingham. It removes barriers for Asian women by encouraging them to engage with leisure facilities; exercise to improve the management of their long term conditions; take up reskilling opportunities; acquire NVQ qualifications and improve their sense of wellbeing and engagement in the community. It also provides a course of adventurous outdoor pursuits for teenage girls.

Learning Launchpad:

Faking It, based on the television programme of the same name, is an intense transformational experience where young people ‘fake it' in an unknown job and unfamiliar surroundings. Participants will quickly learn skills and adopt appropriate personas, opening their eyes to different career opportunities and giving them a real-world learning experience.

The Group Apprentice Scheme (GAS) model will help organisations who might not otherwise get involved in apprenticeship programmes to take on young apprentices and help young people to access apprenticeships. This is done through the creation of several locally based Group Apprenticeship Organisations (GAOs) responsible for recruiting and employing a pool of young people interested in becoming apprentices. GAO's will also work with employers to become ‘host companies' and take on young apprentices for the work based element of their apprenticeship. The GAO arranges off-job training (e.g. at a local college) to support the apprenticeship.

The goal of the Learning Launchpad Part-Time Teaching Programme is to bring business expertise into the education sector by establishing a mechanism that allows business people to spend some of their working week in a school. Schools often lack the skills an extended exposure to industry brings, including; business and organisational planning, financial management, project planning and practical-based skills. The Learning Launchpad Part-Time Teaching Programme aims to establish mutually beneficial relationships whereby the business expert can gain new skills as a classroom teacher and the teachers and students can benefit from the business expert's industry knowledge.

Fastlaners is a short course designed to support, train and prepare graduates for the crucial transition from education to employment. It focuses on non-cognitive skills such as confidence, self-awareness and the ability to work effectively in a team. It aims to improve interview techniques, increase participants' awareness of the job market and provides awareness of the routes into the kind of professional networks the participants have had difficulty accessing.

Studio Schools will be small schools of around 300 students. They will teach the national curriculum through interdisciplinary, enterprise-themed projects, but will have a very different style and ethos to most existing schools, with a much stronger emphasis on practical work and enterprise. Every student will have a personal coach; there will be mixed age teams; and the schools will have many of the features of a workplace (like booking holidays). Studio Schools do not aim to replace other secondary schools - but to complement them by providing an alternative approach suitable for young people looking for a more entrepreneurial option or alienated by traditional pedagogy.

Arrival Education is a practical skills-based programme built around the fundamental question for participating students of 'what do you want to do in your life?'. Participants complete a soft-skill development course facilitated in high achieving corporate environments with programme partners towards their dream 'aspirational work placement' completed within a year. The 'success skills' programme links the students' individual aspirations with their responsibilities as in-school leaders - participants progress their individual performance and complete school related projects as a requirement of the aspirational practical work placement.