iSE is delighted to announce we are one of the West Midlands winners of the NatWest ‘Skills & Opportunities Fund’ for 2017!

Our project, ‘Enterprising Skills for Women‘ will see us providing support for 20 women-led enterprises, encouraging 60 start-up’s through a customised enterprise programme and 100 women to access business skills courses to tackle social isolation and economic deprivation across Birmingham.

Sarah Crawley, CEO of iSE CIC, said, ‘This is a huge benefit to women across Birmingham who have the talent and capacity but currently lack the business skills to start their own enterprises, within their own communities. Just today, the British Council has published a report, The Role of Social Enterprise in Supporting Women’s Empowerment, about the role of women in (social) enterprise but statistics still indicate up to 350 million women world-wide are living in poverty.’

‘At iSE, we are passionate about empowering women and our ‘Enterprising Skills for Women‘ (ESW) project will provide real skills and knowledge-based learning that will not only be capacity and confidence-building, but will enable women to start and manage sustainable, transformational enterprises.’

This funding will extend the work delivered by iSE as part of the Women’s Enterprise Hub and our FUSEprogramme but enable us to work with a much wider community of women across the Birmingham area.

Anyone wishing to know more about how they can be involved in the ESW project can email mariam.yate@i-se.co.uk

You can read about all the winning projects here.