UK’s largest healthcare charity to support social mobility in local communities through £50,000 sponsorship
Ingenuity is delighted to announce that Nuffield Health is investing £50,000 as platinum partners into the programme over the next two years, with a shared commitment to supporting start-ups to directly address the UK’s social and environmental challenges to drive change in local communities.
Ingenuity, founded at Nottingham University Business School in 2016, supports social mobility by providing seed grants and mentorship to innovators looking to start new enterprises. The Ingenuity Programme is an impact-driven business creation programme, which will engage innovators from under-represented and underserved groups across the UK.
Nuffield Health’s sponsorship will encourage applicants to address one of three areas: improving health, building stronger communities and tackling climate change. To date, Ingenuity has supported nearly 3,000 innovators and delivered almost £1M of seed funding, including The Anxiety Map Programme, which created a network of venues trained in anxiety accessibility for people living with anxiety or mental ill health.
Nuffield Health’s support over the next two years will help programme winners launch their start-ups, with the charity sponsoring the Community Challenge Champion, Health Challenge Champion, Climate Challenge Champion and the overall Impact Entrepreneur of the Year awards.
Programme participants will also benefit from the insights of a range of Nuffield Health’s leaders, who will share their expertise with participants through mentoring, skills training sessions, and judging pitches.
Brendan Street, Head of Charity at Nuffield Health, said, “We are really excited to become a platinum partner to Ingenuity, and for the opportunity to work with, and support, people from under-served groups to help bring their ideas to life and make meaningful impact in the communities in which they live. We are all too aware that health inequalities experienced in local communities across the nation, and we hope through this partnership, by nurturing tomorrow’s talent, we can help reduce these to build sustainable communities and ultimately a healthier nation.
Elizabeth Smith, Head of Ingenuity Programme, said, “Over the last six years we have been committed to supporting social mobility through social enterprise, and we are delighted to be continuing this mission with the support of Nuffield Health. Enterprise plays a vital role in building community resilience, tackling health inequalities and developing more sustainable ways of living. We look forward to working with communities to give them the skills, networks and routes to funding to develop solutions that can deliver real change.”
For more information contact pressoffice@nuffieldhealth.com or Elizabeth.Smith@nottingham.ac.uk
About Nuffield Health
Nuffield Health is the UK’s largest healthcare charity. For the last 60 years, Nuffield Health’s experts have been working together to make the nation fitter, healthier, happier and stronger, all for the public benefit.
As an organisation with no shareholders, we invest all our income back into our vision to build a healthier nation. We do this through outstanding day-to-day services in our family of 37 award-winning hospitals, 114 fitness and wellbeing centres, healthcare clinics, and over 125 workplace wellbeing services, and through our flagship programmes to support communities by widening access.
What makes us unique is the breadth of our expertise to provide connected care spanning from personal training and health MOTs to supporting people on their fitness journeys, helping patients recover with physiotherapy or emotional wellbeing counselling, or providing hospital treatments for illness and serious conditions like arthritis or cancer.
Nuffield Health delivers unsurpassed standards, with a sector-leading 94% of our hospitals judged good or excellent by national regulators, so it’s no surprise that we’re trusted by the NHS, private medical insurers, employers and the general public to provide exceptional health and wellbeing services to the nation.
But what also makes us different is our commitment to our flagship programmes to widen access, be that improving the lives of hundreds of children with cystic fibrosis through free exercise classes, or by pioneering the world’s largest research project into how exercise can help men recovering from prostate cancer, or by partnering with schools to provide thousands of pupils with free timetabled programmes to improve their health and wellbeing.
Find out more about us and our pioneering models of care: https://www.nuffieldhealth.com or follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn
About the Ingenuity Programme
The Ingenuity Programme began in 2016 as a business plan competition for the student and graduate population of the Haydn Green Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship and the wider University of Nottingham. In 2019, we expanded into the wider university community, working externally across the Midlands, Malaysia and China, and were joined by our first university partner, the University of Warwick.
Today, the Ingenuity Programme works with 30 university partners across the UK and focuses solely on creating businesses with impact. We’ve supported some fantastic purpose-driven individuals and start-ups over the last five years and you can find out more about our alumni here.
We are committed to creating diverse networks across the UK, bringing expertise from industry and academia together with lived experience from local communities, in order to find solutions that deliver real change.
Find out more about the programme at ingenuityimpact.org, or follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram or Facebook.
