Featured Ideas and Pioneers grantees

Richard Good

Richard Good is passionate about innovation in Northern Ireland’s criminal justice sector. He has 20 years’ experience in organisational and policy development across a range of organisations, including six years as Special Adviser in the Northern Ireland Department of Justice. His Turnaround Employability Project aims to bring together prisoners, their families, local residents, business people, government agencies and voluntary organisations, and engage them in an innovative co-design of the most suitable model for addressing employability barriers for their local prison. The model will unlock community capital, reconnecting people and organisations to their local prison, and enable young people leaving prison to realise their potential. We liked the ambition of Richard’s idea, and felt that he had the experience, buy-in from the community and the right partners in place to make it happen.

Rosie Havers

Rosie Havers developed her ‘Vegucation’ idea whilst undertaking her Masters research project at Cardiff University, having been inspired by her work on school gardening projects in Canada and the USA. Vegucation aims to embed food growing into the school curriculum in an educationally meaningful and sustainable way. The programme will be piloted with five Cardiff primary schools over one academic year (reaching approximately 1500 children) and will deliver one, hour-long gardening session for each class (51 in total) per half-term. A volunteer support network will be established to encourage sustainability and wider community involvement. Rosie’s idea is an excellent fit for the Ideas & Pioneers fund: it is in its early stages and shows real promise; with a number of Cardiff’s primary schools already eager to roll it out.

Ignition Brewery

Nick O’Shea set up Ignition Brewery in 2016 aiming to improve employment opportunities and quality of life for people with learning disabilities. Ignition will develop and trial ‘Salesforce Assemble!’, a training programme for their members with learning disabilities to provide them with the skills and confidence to become effective sales people for the brewery. In doing so, they hope to demonstrate that a sustainable organisation can be created by identifying, utilising and rewarding the talents of their team and to contribute to reducing the 93% unemployment rate among people with learning disabilities. Nick’s social brewery stood out as a truly innovative enterprise and we were really excited about his idea of developing Salesforce Assemble!

Siobhan Pyburn

Siobhan Pyburn wants to bring survivor insight into training for professionals working with survivors of childhood sexual abuse. Siobhan has created a short film, aired on TV, telling her story of child sexual abuse, as well as raising awareness by speaking at conferences on child sexual exploitation and establishing her own YouTube channel focusing on specific aspects of abuse. With PHF funding, she plans to distil her learning on this issue into training resources, while continuing her activism to bring survivor insight to the fore and developing her skills as a speaker and presenter. She plans to work three days per week on resource development, speaking and other activism over the six-month grant period. We were inspired by Siobhan’s pioneering work and felt that she was the right person to make this timely and ambitious idea a success.

Juno Roche

Juno Roche is a campaigner, dedicated to creating systemic and structural change in the field of trans sexual health. With this funding, she will seek to highlight the sexual health needs of trans people with particular reference to HIV. She will put on a roundtable event bringing together leading HIV clinicians, academics and representatives from the trans community. She will commission a film about the work of CliniQ, a specialist sexual health service for trans people, and training from CLiniQ staff for 16 other sexual health clinics in London and the Home Counties. Juno’s creative approach gave us confidence that her idea would have significant impact.