Celebrating the UK’s Annual Pro Bono Week

For the UK’s annual Pro Bono Week, I thought I’d write about a charity project I did a few weeks ago.

One of the reasons I joined the Eden McCallum Analyst Programme a year ago is because of the opportunities to contribute to work with their NGO partners. A year later, some time between projects happened to coincide with a request from Impetus, a UK-based charity which “transforms the lives of disadvantaged young people” by providing funding and advice to help charities achieve maximum impact. They wanted a team to research the availability of Alternative Provision (AP) in the UK.

AP caters for students who generally have been excluded from mainstream schools and is a hugely overlooked area. Additionally, students who attend AP are more likely to be from disadvantaged backgrounds or have special educational needs.

Our task was to produce a review of the AP market, its size, historic trends and to recommend areas in which Impetus might be able to have an impact. I worked alongside two other Eden McCallum consultants for this short “sprint” project. We spent a week digging into news articles, government papers and school websites to produce a presentation for the Impetus team. We received a fantastic response and it was exciting to hear that some of the charities that I found in my research would be included in their pipeline.

In addition to the great development opportunity of presenting large sections of the deck to the Impetus team, the main reason I enjoyed working on this project was the prospect of its potential impact. I hope that an increased focus on the AP sector over the next few years will have a positive impact on some of the UK’s most disadvantaged children.