2024 Winners

• Khadys Dream –  aims to educate young people with their Before You Committ programme about the untold consequences of entering the criminal justice system so they can make better life decisions.
• Getting Clean – a lived experience recovery organisation led by recovering addicts which has pioneered a social enterprise model to provide skills and a safety net to fellow recovering addicts.
• Local Energy Systems – a novel machine learning approach using AI to accelerate the growth of community renewable energy with the potential to eliminate fuel poverty and catalyse progress towards net-zero transition.
• Beam Project –  offers professional training that is designed and delivered by people with direct experience of child sexual abuse to train professionals, with a view to increasing the number of disclosures.

2023 winners

• Children Heard and Seen – was established in response to the lack of support available to children impacted by parental imprisonment.  They developed a unique way to recognise and offer specialist mentoring and support vulnerable young children, to break the cycle of intergenerational offending.
• Release Mates –  are pioneering the way prison leavers transition into normal life. They offer immediate support to people after they leave prison, from former prison mates, who understand the difficulties facing those embroiled in the criminal justice system from their own lived experience.
• Tangent – are dismantling barriers to social mobility through their employment referral platform. They are on a mission to close the professional network gap for millions of people by helping lower socioeconomic jobseekers (63% of the UK population) access employment opportunities which are out of reach due to systemic inequalities.

2022 Winners

• R;pple Suicide Prevention – ensures immediate support can be given to individuals contemplating self-harm or suicide through online searches. R;pple is a browser extension compatible with desktop computers and laptops. Once R;pple is downloaded, an individual’s search for harmful material relating to self-harm and suicide would be intercepted.
• Real Ice – works on growing ice using renewable energy sources like wind and tide. Their aim is to reduce ice melt to prove that it is both technically feasible and financially viable to restore Arctic sea ice, in order to then inspire other, global organisations to take up the mantle at massive scale, thereby cooling the planet and helping defer the worst of the impact of ocean heating.
• The Vavengers – is the only UK’s first and only pop-up holistic support and wellness space for survivors of FGM/C or gender-based violence. As a survivor and migrant-led organisation, they stand  with and for every woman affected by Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C) and Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG).

2021 Winners

• Parenting Mental Health – addresses the adolescent mental health crisis by supporting, skilling and empowering parents to transform their child’s mental health and their own. Through their training, emotional support interventions, and community of 20,000+ parents, they aim to take the isolation, shame, and stigma away from unsupported parents facing unenviable challenges.
• Standing Tall – matches people experiencing homelessness into stable jobs in responsible businesses. Alongside this, they ensure these individuals have a safe home to come back to through their ‘Amici’ hosting accommodation service. Their results prove that it’s this unique combination that’s vital – a job and a home together that’s helping people to move away from the streets for good.
• Say It With Your Chest –  has developed a training programme in to reduce the rate of exclusions in schools, where young people are effectively supported to thrive and realise their potential and build a better future for themselves. The training gives staff the skills and tools to support students who display disruptive behaviour.
• Street Storage – is the only UK charity providing free safe storage for people experiencing homelessness. Working in partnership with day centres, outreach teams, soup kitchens, local authorities, the prison service and national charities such as Crisis and St Mungos, in two storage units across London, they are seeing the situation worsen in the aftermath of COVID19.

2020 Winners

• The Black Curriculum – advocates the importance of teaching British Black history all year round by  training senior leaders and equipping teachers to develop systemic inclusivity and to create anti-racist schools.  They previously operated a face-to-face model, and successfully trained 400+ teachers across 7 cities. Moving forward, they are building an at scale mode of ending racial inequality in the classroom by providing accredited courses delivered by domain experts, together with lesson material on a single online platform.
• MYTIME Young Carers Charity – aims to raise awareness of young carers within their school communities, to equip schools with the tools and the know-how to identify and more effectively support young carers. A young carer is a child, just like any other, yet they represent a largely forgotten community. These children work incredibly hard to take care of their loved ones and often face enormous disadvantages as a result. This will ultimately ensure that young carers have everything they need to achieve their full personal, academic and professional potential.

2019 Winners

• Breadwinners – a grassroots not for profit social enterprise and charity, with the aim of supporting refugees with employment, work experience, training and mentoring whilst providing Londoners with the best organic artisan bread.  It supports both refugees with their first UK Job, as well as young people seeking asylum in the UK with their first volunteer work experience, selling the highest quality organic bread on farmer’s markets across London.
• Inside Workout – a free fitness and wellbeing magazine specifically designed for prison inmates, featuring articles on exercise, nutrition and mental well-being. The aim of the magazine is to encourage inmates to focus their energies on positive self improvement and, through interviews and stories, show them how people who have been in a similar position to themselves have used a healthy lifestyle to create positive changes within themselves and their community upon after release.

2018 Winners

• Equal Access Loan – a first (and only) nationwide interest-free loan scheme for refugees, launched by RefuAid. The loan scheme provides support to those who have been granted refugee status and have full rights to remain and to work. They offer interest-free loans of up to £10,000, for internationally-trained refugees to pay for UK accreditation, requalification or training, enabling them to return to employment in their prior professional fields. They are currently working at a 100% repayment rate.

• EcoActTanzania (Garbage Medical Insurance) – a social enterprise established micro health insurance program which uses garbage as a financial resource. With this program, the community and uninsured poor slum dwellers are able to pay for health cover, drugs and other clinical services by using garbage as payment to an insurance scheme.
• Project Baala – seeks to make menstruation a non-issue in India, through specially designed reusable sanitary napkins that can be used for two years and innovative menstrual awareness workshops. Their aim is to impact the 87% of women and girls in India who use old rags and sometimes even leaves, hay and sand as menstrual absorbents.

2017 Winners

• Settle – an award-winning social enterprise that supports vulnerable young people moving into their first home. By designing and delivering 1:1 training programmes to young homeless people, they ensure that they have the skills needed to sustain a tenancy. Founded in 2014, Settle is now at an important stage in its growth and this year they are scaling their programmes to work with over 160 young people in London, quadrupling their current reach.
• SafetyNet Technologies – who design and build devices that use light to help fishermen catch the right fish and tackle some of the biggest issues facing the commercial fishing industry. Their primary goal is to increase the selectivity of commercial fishing practices by being more selective with the fish caught, allowing the industry to become more sustainable. Light, which has been of interest to the fishing gear-technology community since the 1970s, can be used as a tool to achieve this as it’s been shown that light can reduce by-catch by up to 90%.

2016 Winners

• Campaign Bootcamp – a hands on learning environment designed to give people the skills, network and confidence they need to change the world through campaigning. Campaign Bootcamp actively encourages and provides support to people not currently represented in the campaigning sector; in particular women, people with disabilities and people of marginalised cultures, faiths and ethnicities.
• Canute – a new digital Braille ‘iPad’, which attempts to transform the lives of blind people by helping reverse the decline in Braille literacy. It will be the world’s first multiline Braille ebook reader and an entirely new class of device to bring Braille to people who would otherwise be unable to afford anything other than massive, bulky hard copy Braille. Costing less than a Perkins Brailler or iPad Pro, this innovative Braille has already been piloted with two leading blind schools.

2015 Winners

• Energy Local – Social enterprise ‘Energy Local’ has found a means for a community to pool their local generation, use it directly and benefit from time of use prices. Using a Community Energy Services Company (CESCO) the community’s half-hourly smart meter readings are grouped together and any local renewable generation is netted off.
• Go-Forward – Creating a home-away-from home centre where able but isolated care leavers who have nowhere else to go can find a safe and welcoming haven – where ambitious young people with plans for the future can, when disheartened and facing brick walls, get advice and support from Go-Forward.
• Spark Inside – Their vision is to systemically address the issues of persistent reoffending and increasing prison violence, by improving relationships between prisoners and officers thereby increasing their quality of life and changing the culture within entire penal institutions.