About RED
As part of the Mutually Inclusive Partnerships, RED collaborates with a range of disability, employment and enterprise specialists to ensure the best possible entrepreneurial journey.
Rapid Enterprise Development (RED) operates across the health, employment, disability and social care sectors to offer interactive and accessible approaches to the development of enterprise opportunities with and for disabled people.
Rapid Enterprise Development (RED) operates across the health, employment, disability and social care sectors to offer interactive and accessible approaches to the development of enterprise opportunities with and for disabled people.
Partners
Mutually Inclusive Partnerships is a UK based organisation that brings together a number of social enterprises, employment programmes and initiatives designed to offer innovative and practical approaches to supporting more people with learning difficulties into employment.
www.mutuallyinclusive.co.uk |
Sixteen is a co-operative social enterprise set up to bring evidence based supported employment services to people with a learning disability interested in finding paid employment. They run a number of community and educational programmes in and around the Bristol area working with disabled people, families and others keen to improve employment outcomes for people with a learning difficulty.
www.sixteencoop.co.uk |
STARTUP aims to empower young disabled people to start their own enterprise and supports them to overcome barriers to doing so.
The project empowers youth workers to support them in this process by building bridges between youth workers and successful entrepreneurs and by sharing experience, best practice and guidance. STARTUP offers an online portal for young disabled entrepreneurs, an e-learning course and a range of other educational resources. www.startup-project.eu/ |
Community is a modern trade union with over a hundred years’ of experience standing up for working people. With roots in traditional industries, Community now represents workers across the UK in various sectors, including the self employed, and has a long tradition of representing disabled workers. The National League of the Blind and Disabled is a section of Community, and Community is committed to driving positive change for disabled workers including investigating the opportunities and support available to self employed disabled workers.
www.community-tu.org |
Boss Employment CIC is an employment promotion and information bureau that works to promote the employment of people with learning difficulties by making sure that more people get a chance to think about work, and access the support they need.
www.bossemployment.co.uk |
The RED Story
Rapid Enterprise Development (RED) emerged from the work of Keith Bates and Guy Turnbull in response to the need to provide better enterprise support options for disabled people. Keith and Guy came together through their work in social firm, social enterprise and co-operative development to redesign the way enterprise support and training was conceptualised.
Keith’s work developed from a supported employment perspective where he had been supporting people with learning disabilities to establish worker co-ops as a way to create alternative routes in employment. This complimented Guy’s background in Co-operative development and the two worked together to open up the world of entrepreneurship to a wider audience. Originally focusing on training for disabled people to set up their own enterprise, the basis of their approach to job-creation was the RED (Rapid Enterprise Development) workshop which sought to offer an interactive space, support and activities to help disabled people work out the basics of a business idea, feasibility, planning and research. The RED approach immediately started to have an impact and local authorities, voluntary sector organisations and others quickly saw the benefits of an approach that combined enterprise facilitation with employment support. In recognition of the need to expand the RED offer to raise the capacity, skills and aspirations of support workers, the RED training suite expanded to include workshops around business innovation, assessment and market research. Whilst the RED workshops remain part of a wider journey for people with learning disabilities and others interested in exploring self-employment and small business ownership, RED continues to engage with the wider policy and infrastructure debate to ensure that supported self-employment becomes a sustainable option for disabled people. |