Transforming the lives and opportunities of young people
In 2023 we embarked on an exciting new partnership between our London office and Future Frontiers, giving our teams the opportunity to help transform the lives and opportunities of disadvantaged young people in our local community.
Future Frontiers was established to address barriers and support young people living in some of the most underprivileged communities in London to unlock their potential and begin a journey to a happy and prosperous future.
Their impact is inspirational; they have partnered with 89 schools in low-income communities, 130 businesses as coaching partners and supported an impressive 6,000 young people to discover their strengths and motivations and channel their aspirations into taking positive steps towards a lasting career.
Perfectly aligned to our purpose of helping you prosper; we are committed to fostering prosperity for our people and local communities. It’s our goal to collaborate with our communities and help them flourish. We want to champion causes that matter and give people the opportunity to thrive, which formed the foundation of our partnership with Future Frontiers.
From the outset, we were motivated by the prospect of being able to support underprivileged pupils from a school close to our London office. Having circulated information to our teams to gauge interest, Future Frontiers joined one of our quarterly Prosperity Update calls to share their story and to tell us about the programme and the impact it’s had to date with other London schools and corporate partners. We were delighted at the response from our teams. We had lots of interest from all different levels of the business, from partners through to trainees, and so decided to proceed with the initiative.
We are always looking for opportunities to help our teams and our communities prosper, and this project provided both – our teams can give back to their local community, plus develop coaching skills in the meantime. Through close collaboration with the Future Frontiers teams, we identified a suitable school Haberdashers Borough Academy.
The school’s mission to encourage pupils to become their best immediately resonated with us and aligned with our values, behaviours and commitment to helping others achieve prosperity. Their values of community, aspiration, resilience and kindness united with ours. Our values in our London office are to live empathy, be present, make progress and, ultimately, to enjoy it! We believe that by upholding each of these values we will help build toward better societal change. We knew from the beginning, through close collaboration during all stages of the programme, we had the potential to establish a partnership to be proud of with Haberdashers Borough Academy.
We selected seven dedicated volunteers from various teams within our organisation who had shown an interest in taking part to embark on this meaningful journey with 15 year 10 pupils from Haberdashers Borough Academy. Through a series of engaging and personalised coaching sessions, totalling six hours per pupil, our volunteers guided these young minds to explore their interests, discover inspiring careers and look ahead to the future as they considered their next steps.
The sessions were immersive experiences, and pupils were actively encouraged to delve into their passions. Our volunteers helped pupils identify their skills, interests and career values and use these to explore their future education and career options. The teens were also supported to use an online tool to explore different careers that matched their passions and ambitions and discovered more about a range of qualifications available to help them on their journey to success.
Born from a desire to close the opportunity gap
The sessions culminated with each pupil speaking to a role model from their desired sector, which helped them to understand the career pathways available and inspired them to make ambitious choices for their future. These pupils often lack role models and support networks to advise them about a range of career sectors and to be a beacon of hope for what they can achieve if they work hard and focus on achieving their career goals. Our volunteers were able to connect with each individual and showcase the possibilities they have within their reach.
Don’t just take our word for it. Check out some of the feedback we received from the wonderful pupils at Haberdashers Borough Academy and our brilliant UHY coaches.
Olly Sills, Head of Year 10 at Haberdashers Borough Academy, had this to say:
“Thank you so much for such a fantastic start to the Future Frontiers programme. Our students absolutely loved the sessions and said how useful they were.”
Imran Ahmed, Audit Associate at UHY Hacker Young, had this to say about his time as a coach:
“I feel proud to have taken part in this collaboration with Future Frontiers acting as a career coach for children from a local school in the area. If you ever get an opportunity to act as a mentor in any capacity in life, I say jump at it. If you ever get to shape the perspectives of young people, I say be confident in your own insights, have faith in the process and go for it. You won’t regret it.”
Despite the ongoing success of Future Frontier’s programme and the positive impact it’s having on young people throughout London, their latest Annual Impact Report, released in 2023, reveals how the programme is still very much needed and how there remains a lot of work to be done to ensure young people from more deprived areas of the city have access to these coaching opportunities to fulfil their potential.
The statistics shared are alarming, highlighting three in five of their target pupils do not complete the post-16 qualification they enrol upon, one in two of their target pupils do not achieve a Level 3 qualification (equivalent to A Levels) by age 19, and three in four disadvantaged young people earn below the real living wage by age 25. Shocking? We think so too. Where a young person is born shouldn’t determine where they go and what they can achieve in life. Thanks to Future Frontiers, countless teenagers are now able to access education and employment opportunities that will set them on the right road to success.
Dominic and the team at Future Frontiers have been instrumental in transforming the lives and opportunities of so many young people through their programme of support. The work they do is phenomenal, and we are honoured to have played a part in the coaching sessions.
“I’d like to say a huge thank you for choosing to support our young people on their career journeys over the last couple of months”, says Dominic. “Through your dedication, they have been able to explore and connect pathways to careers they would not previously have known, considered or thought possible”. He concludes: “Thank you for encouraging and empowering our young people on their early steps towards making their ambitions a reality”.
It has been our pleasure to be involved. We are delighted to support Future Frontiers and contribute to the great work they are doing. It was brilliant to witness first hand the importance of what they do and the lasting impact they can have on young people. We have a feeling that this is the start of a successful partnership and are very much looking forward to working with the charity again.
Continuing to help our communities prosper
At UHY we recognise the importance of contributing to a society with whom we are inextricably linked. We pride ourselves on our people focused values; from working closely with our clients to forging ties with members of our local community, as well as supporting our own people in their fundraising and voluntary activities.
We believe our local expertise complements our national focus in terms of our corporate social responsibilities. Our network of offices in the UK is diverse in terms of size and location – from small towns to large cities – however, there are strong commonalities that unify us in terms of our approach and belief in Corporate Social Responsibility.
