Support & Mentoring Enabling Entrepreneurship

SAMEE - (Support And Mentoring Enabling Entrepreneurship) is a regional charity with a mission to enable disabled people to escape poverty and gain further independence through successful self-employment start-up.
Teaching those with special educational needs and disabilities valuable self-employment skills, empowering them to create a role for themselves with an independent income.

As Disability Confident Leaders, our unique delivery style is a flexible mix of personalised 1:1 guidance from fully qualified advisers and peer mentoring support.

Since 2016 we have worked with over 1000 disabled people and have given them mentoring, advice and guidance supporting them with their aspirations, goals and opportunities to create a realistic sustainable income for themselves.

In the first place this support can start during their education as we explore self-employment as a viable career option for those that may not attain the qualifications required for further/higher education, apprenticeship, or traditional employment opportunities.

So why was SAMEE founded :- After years of business mentoring for the Princes Trust, Sam applied for a position as a Business Adviser with a national organisation, who offered a generic package of business support over a set period of time.

Generic Business Support - Not fit for Purpose . . .

Whilst delivering the European-funded guidance she recognised that the self-employment programmes offered did not meet the requirements of disabled people as they were not flexible or suitable to serve their individual needs.

Additionally in fact, many of the disabled people gave up on their aspiration of becoming self-employed as they were unable to work within the constraints of the funding.
Many were not ready to take the step into starting a self-employed venture and expressed concerns over the lack of emotional support in relation to their lives, health condition and financial needs.

Notably they also said that exploring self-employment as an option, including the opportunities and challenges, was far more important to them than the structured workshops on marketing and accounting.
First & foremost they wanted support & guidance with someone to share their aspirations and fears with rather than a rigid programme of technical learning.

Moreover one which met the needs of disabled people, communicated with them in a way that was accessible and created opportunities for them to aspire to greater things.

So she started SAMEE to address the needs of disabled people wanting to consider self-employment as a viable career option alongside their disability or long-term health condition.

Tailor-made guidance to suit personal needs . . .

Researching further into the self-employment information, advice and guidance available to disabled people nationally, Sam started discovering that there was very limited assistance.
In most cases, the disabled person had to meet the requirements of the support offered rather than the support meeting the disabled person’s needs.

Sam’s concerns about formal self-employment support led her to think about starting an organisation that did just that . . .

She started by working with a small group of disabled people, developing personalised tailor-made projects and bespoke resources and, through this continuing engagement and work, found that ‘consideration’ to the individual person is the key word in all thoughts and processes . . .

Above all the holistic needs of all people with any disabilty are just as important, if not more so, than the generic tick box formal self-employment support on offer from mainstream agencies . . .

This is what has inspired us to start You've Got This

SAMEE creates an estimated £8.56 million in social value per annum at a cost of £73,860, which implies a benefit-cost ratio of 115.9 to 1.
This implies that for every £1 spent, £115.92 of social value is created.
This is an exceptionally high benefit-cost ratio, driven by the sharp improvement in wellbeing and employment outcomes reported and the high level of attribution to SAMEE as opposed to other factors

New Economic Foundation (2020)

As shown above : This was our impact in 2020 - Now move on to 2023/24 . . .

SAMEE has grown & improved since that point - It would be interesting to re-run the report . . .