Early-stage ventures join Young Academy accelerator

Today (2 Oct) The Young Academy welcomes a new cohort of early-stage social ventures committed to improving the educational outcomes for disadvantaged young people to its flagship accelerator programme.

The Young Academy Accelerator is an intensive and specialist business support programme. Participants will attend intensive workshops and receive one-to-one support from social impact experts, volunteer advisors and education sector leaders. Our goal is to create a space for ideas and projects to be tested, and support the ventures to map out how their work is impacting young people’s lives within a wider system.

Since launching in 2014, The Young Academy has supported over 60 ventures, including Museum in a Box, ImpactEd and Inclusive Classrooms. 15 of the most promising ventures have been backed with over £1 million in seed capital – the portfolio includes Think for the Future, Smart School Councils, TalentEd, Potentially and Structural Learning.

The new ventures to join the accelerator are:

• Beyond the Classroom delivers innovative life-skills programmes to young people, with an emphasis on the performing arts, youth leadership and peer mentoring.
• Career Ear is a careers advice app enabling young people to ask industry professionals career-related questions and make well-informed decisions about their futures.
• Get Further supports young people in post-16 education to improve their skills and confidence in English and Maths.
• Project Access is a mentorship programme that connects prospective applicants from state schools with current university students from similar backgrounds.
• Spaghetti Brain® is an app that helps primary school children to understand and manage their own learning.
• SupportEd is developing an in-school mentoring and emotional literacy programme to prevent children at risk of violence from permanent exclusions.
• Supernotes is a cloud-based note-taking tool with integrated engagement and motivational features that simplifies and improves the learning workflow of students.
• SAMEE provides disabled young people with the practical knowledge and skills needed for exploring self-employment career goals.

  The Young Academy is delivered with support from the Bank of America Merrill Lynch and UBS as core funders, and Whole Education, New Philanthropy Capital, Hogan Lovells and Wolff Olins as programme partners.

The Young Foundation has a long track record in initiating and scaling hundreds of social ventures through programmes such as Reimagining Rent, Amplify and Realising Ambition.

About The Young Foundation: A UKRI accredited Independent Research Organisation, social investor and community development practitioner, our mission is to develop better connected and more sustainable communities across the UK. Specialising in community-focussed topics like place-making, health and wellbeing, lived experiences of inequality, education and social entrepreneurship, we work at a local and national level and in partnership with others.

We have created and supported over 80 organisations that target areas of unmet social need, including: Which? The Open University, Language Line, Social Innovation Exchange, School for Social Entrepreneurs, Uprising and Action for Happiness.