A not-for-profit education and wellbeing enterprise in Bristol has received £75,000 from Resonance’s South West Social Investment Tax Relief Fund.
Leading Lights (LL) is using the money to develop its city centre hub space, create a new community café, expand outreach services and deliver a new range of projects to help children and young people with social, emotional and mental health difficulties.
The loan has also helped the organisation, which works with schools, local authorities, the NHS, charities and universities, to establish its first specialist hub in Bristol.
The hub - called Glow - offers support for children and young people of primary and secondary school age, and their families.
It will offer a range of wellbeing programmes, including small-group mentoring, creative therapeutic learning programmes, advocacy drop ins, therapeutic creative writing, and parent support programmes.
LL says it will generate revenue to keep the programmes free by expanding its education arm to meet demand from local authorities and will also open a café and coffee shop within Glow that will serve the local community.
'Many of them have been through so many adverse experiences'
Sarah Louise Hopkins of Leading Lights said: "We are just absolutely thrilled that this amazing support that Resonance has given us will allow us to help more wonderful children and young people to thrive.
"Many of them have been through so many adverse experiences and fight every day to overcome the barriers that society puts in their way because of their mental health needs.
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"They are truly inspirational and being able to finally launch Glow, our first specialist hub, having more staff and more capacity – all of which this loan allows us to do - will make a huge difference to how much we can help them to achieve what they deserve over the next few years.
"We are all glowing! It has given us a real chance at building sustainability for the future and to have real impact.”
LL also provides education support for young people who are unable to access main-stream education due to mental health needs, as well as mentoring or therapeutic activities.
Katalin Juhasz, Resonance’s Investment Manager added: “I am delighted that the investment from Resonance will not only allow Leading Lights to meet the increasing demand for their services both from individual families and from organisations but will also enable them to develop their Bristol hub space and café, accelerating their impact sustainably through social investment at the right time.”
The Resonance South West SITR Fund is a social impact investment fund aimed at helping to dismantle poverty in the South West by investing in local social enterprises.
It takes advantage of social investment tax relief (SITR) to lower the cost of loans for enterprises and to enable a competitive return to investors.