Blogs
London’s creatives: left out of pandemic support, until now
Imagine you are a creative freelancer at the start of lockdown. You have been building your business over the past few years and you know how to meet new market demands, but the dance studios, art galleries and community centres are now entirely closed.
Allia launches year-long Climate in Focus campaign
Allia has kick-started a Climate in Focus campaign that will span activities within its Future Business Centres and the programmes that its venture support team deliver in 2022, in order to raise the urgency of the climate crisis and support those who have innovative solutions to address it.
Launch of Climate Accelerator inspires with tech solutions to save the planet
Like a bright sunrise in January, the Climate Accelerator launch day lit Allia’s hopes for a great year ahead. Last week, the conference room at the British Antarctic Survey was filled with greetings as the Climate Accelerator cohort members gathered to pitch their ideas to each other, sharing their plans for a greener future.
Preparing for pitch day
As we observe in Dragons Den, the process of pitching a business idea before a panel of judges is daunting, to say the least. A stage sweat, worsened by the overhead lights, and the loud sound of expectation and applause are enough to send most people home.
Four lessons that innovation can learn from impact
The impact field is often regarded as difficult to quantify, qualify, and monetise. Yet as more social enterprises and other purpose-driven businesses continue to emerge and shine, the fact of impact’s real success is becoming impossible to ignore. There may be specific learnings that corporate leaders can glean from the experiences of founders in the impact space.
Meet Kate Hughes, our Facilities Manager
When did you join Allia?
June 2019, almost 2.5 years ago
Has your role changed since you started here – and in what way?
I started as an Assistant Facilities Manager and was promoted to Facilities Manager within my first year.
Amplify your impact with Allia’s new founder’s club
The last 18 months have caused a new kind of anxiety for small business and start-up founders. One of the key things we’ve been hearing about is a lack of engagement outside their founder ‘bubbles’. People haven’t been networking; they haven’t been chatting over coffee or meeting at the water cooler and thus have missed the opportunity to meet new contacts.
Check out our programmes launching this summer!
We’re busy at Allia Future Business Centres with lots of recruitment for our business support programmes across all locations!
Our free business support programmes started running in 2013 and are now delivered across East London, Peterborough and Cambridge. Our programmes are designed to help entrepreneurs get their ideas off the ground, help small businesses and start-ups to grow and scale, and help ventures to create positive impact in social and environmental innovation.
Lessons from the Impact Accelerator
At Allia, we have been working with impact ventures for many years (70+ ventures and over £90 million raised by alumni). Yet we are still iterating on how we can make the Impact Accelerator more and more relevant to founders and the ecosystem as a whole.