ESG in Action: Trailblazing with Ablaze: Helping young people succeed

Gilly Samuddin (00:06)

Genuinely one thing can make a huge difference for a young person, so you don't have to be an expert, you don't have to have huge amounts of time or anything like that. What you need is a passion for supporting young people.

Alex Holsgrove Jones (00:20)

Welcome to ESG in Action. I’m Alex Holsgrove Jones, Knowledge partner and ESG lead for TLT, and we’re exploring how values-driven leadership, sustainable thinking and inclusive culture are transforming the business landscape. Each episode, I’m joined by a guest who drives ESG progress – from charity leaders to household brands – and they’ll be sharing the tangible impacts of ESG-led decision making.  

Today I'm joined by someone whose work embodies ESG in the most human and immediate way. Gillie Samuddin is the CEO of Ablaze, a charity that exists to tackle inequality of opportunity for young people across the West of England. Ablaze mobilises business volunteers to provide essential support, insight and guidance to help young people thrive. TLT has been working with Ablaze since the charity's early days, supporting the amazing work they do.

Gilly, it's wonderful to have you here. Thank you so much for joining me.

Gilly Samuddin (01:17)

Thank you so much for having me. I'm really looking forward to the chat.

Alex Holsgrove Jones (01:20)

So you recently stepped into the role of CEO at Ablaze, and I'd love to start by asking you what it was that drew you to Ablaze in the first place? What made the role, and the organisation, feel like the right next chapter for you?

Gilly Samuddin (01:35)

Absolutely. Well, I have to start by saying that Ablaze is a fantastic charity and I am so proud to work with the amazing team that I'm working with now and the team I've already worked with in the past because we are all so passionate about what we do.  

I actually started as a primary school teacher for 12 years. It was a job that I absolutely loved: making a real difference, supporting young people all the way through and it was that passion for teaching and noticing that with the right support and encouragement, you can transform a child's young person's confidence and open up their eyes to a world of possibilities.  

So, when I left teaching, due to the long hours, the lack of weekends, the marking, I wanted to find a job that enabled me to still have meaning, something with purpose, but that wasn't directly in the classroom. So I was trawling, trawling the job sites and something about Ablaze struck me. I think it was the fact that it's a small charity. It's very local. So we actually have the opportunity to really get to know people. But from the moment I saw the ad, something resonated with me. It was a chance to make a difference to young people without being in the classroom. It was that opportunity to share my passion for, yeah, for that support, for making a difference to young people with a wider audience, the opportunity to actually bridge into the corporate sector.  

I'd gone from school myself to uni into the classroom teaching. So I'd never experienced the world of work at all and genuinely, it was very much eye opening when I started at Ablaze and what I loved straight away was the fact that we all care. We genuinely love the programmes that we support and train the volunteers to get involved in. And yet, it was that chance to use my skills in a different way to support volunteers to get into the classroom and do what I love.

Like I said at the start, some fantastic colleagues all along the way. My predecessor, Sally, has really instilled in me the value that we can make and the value we have in Bristol and our surrounding areas. So yeah, I think that was it was a fact to be able to make a difference in a small team with a big heart.

Alex Holsgrove Jones (04:00)

That's amazing and that sense of purpose really comes through, and it leads naturally to us wanting to understand a little bit more about the work itself. So, for listeners who may not yet have come across Ablaze, could you just give us a quick overview of the programmes that you run and how they support young people at different stages of their education or development?

Gilly Samuddin (04:18)

Of course, of course. So all of our programmes are designed around that idea of early intervention and giving young people at whatever stage they are the right support at the right time. So, our mission is to tackle inequality of opportunity and raise aspiration for young people and we do that from primary through secondary and beyond, which is fantastic. our original, our founding program was our Reading and Number Partners program and that is a one-to-one programme where we match a business with a local primary school. And that's key for me when I say local. When I joined at Ablaze, I made sure that all our reading partnerships were in a 15-minute commute of a business. So, you could really feel that you are impacting the community in which a lot of your staff live and work. So, the reading is one-to-one support with a child to build their confidence, their fluency, and their enjoyment of reading.

So, volunteers will spend 30 minutes once a week with a child for as long as possible. So, most of our partnerships last a whole academic year. So you really get to know the children during that time. So, it's an opportunity to have a huge difference on a child about how they perceive learning and education.  

A lot of the children we support have significant barriers to their learning. Many have English as an additional language, which does not prevent them learning and making fantastic progress, but it is a barrier that they need to overcome. They need extra support, practicing, reading aloud, building up their bank of words, their vocabulary, comprehension and that's what the reading program does. So that is my favourite. I am absolutely biased on it. I managed it for three years. I love it. But it's not the only programme we do.  

So primary school, we develop key skills, reading and numeracy. We then do career mentoring in secondary schools to boost aspirations, transferable skills and awareness of the world of work for young people because you can't aspire to be something you don't see.  

Young people's social network influences their ideas about their future. So, we are absolutely passionate about raising  their awareness of what is available and the world of work has changed since I was at school, since the majority of our volunteers were at school and we have a responsibility to help inform young people about the potential careers of the future. Many of the jobs that they'll do when they grow up don't even exist at the moment - with the changes in with AI and IT, it's a fast-paced world. But the career mentoring helps the children focus on those transferable skills that are relevant for all jobs.  

So, we get a group of volunteers into a school to work with a small group of targeted children, and we've got a range of ways of doing that. We've got a one-day program where it's a real kind of insight day and that can be held at the business. We do a multi-session program which TLT are involved in, which is building those skills over time. So, you really get to know the young people and develop a relationship so you can target the intervention you're providing. And then we've also this year introduced a coaching module as well for Key Stage 5 students. So those at sixth form ready to make their next step who want a bit more targeted support. And that then leads on, in a sense, to our final program, which is our employability skills. That program specifically supports young people who are NEET, and that stands for not in education, employment or training. So, the 16- to 25-year-olds, many have found that the education system just didn't work for them. They didn't leave school knowing what they wanted to do. They haven't found that next step in their route to work or their future. So, we offer a range of workshops that we deliver ourselves, Ablaze staff deliver those and then we offer each young person a 10-day work experience placement with one of our business partners. They have a mentor throughout the whole programme, and it really offers targeted personalised support for that young person. Again, opening their eyes to potential jobs that they didn't know that they had the skills for or an interest in because no one had ever told them about it. So, we do spend a lot of time getting to know the young people we work with. So, we're able to offer those meaningful next steps.  

All our programs have the same aim, which is to help young people essentially understand what's possible, develop their key skills and make them feel more confident about their future and help them get there. So yeah, that's a little bit.

Alex Holsgrove Jones (09:00)

For such a small charity, Gilly, you've got a lot going on and those programs are clearly doing really meaningful work. But some people still think of community engagement as a bit of a nice to have, something organisations do when they have time or capacity. But the reality is, isn't it, that the impact can be really profound. Are you able to measure the difference your programs make in the lives of the young people you work with?

Gilly Samuddin (09:29)

Absolutely. So, we do spend a lot of time thinking about how to meaningfully track that impact, both because the businesses want to know the impact they're having and for us to report back to the schools that the support we're providing is relevant to what they're needing to build on. So, we measure impact in a variety of different ways, we have qualitative and quantitative assessments going on.

So, for our reading numbers and career mentoring programs, we do a variety of questionnaires, pre- and post-programme. So, we're tracking changes in confidence, engagement in school and their literacy and numeracy attainment. So, the surveys, we also send out to the teachers, we send them out to the volunteers, we send them out to the mentors we work with and the business part that organises just to see what impact they feel the volunteering program has had. So, it's not just on the young people.  

We also track changes on the volunteers themselves because we genuinely believe that volunteering can have a positive impact on an individual and consequently the business as a whole, because that's what you want out of it.  

We do case studies as well. We speak very closely with schools, volunteers and young people and hear their stories. We're popping into all our sessions, really seeing how it's working on the ground. So again, we can pivot, we can adapt, we can change as needed.  

Last year, we've just produced our latest impact report. So last year, we can report that over 90% of pupils who had a reading partner now read with more confidence and have improved literacy attainments. Now that's reported by the schools, and we ask them to do that based on the impact the reading partner has had. So, this is progress in addition to what would be expected in the classroom naturally without that support. So that is absolutely fantastic. Over 70 % of children made progress in their maths, maths or number partners, which is maths games and with our career mentoring, 86% of young people felt more confident about themselves, which at secondary school, is massive and 100% of those involved learnt more about the skills needed for the world of work. So, it's really important that we collect this data because it evidences the need and the impact our programmes can have and we share that with our business partners because we know our interventions make a real difference, but we want to share that with you because we can't do it without the support of the businesses who provide the volunteers.

There's loads of national research out there about the impact of interventions around career mentoring, early interventions, reading support, key skills support have on children, but particularly children who might otherwise disengage with school environments and we do have case studies where schools have said, in fact, our latest round of career mentoring, we have schools that said the children have only come in on the days that actually your mentors are coming into work with them because it's different, because they don't see this as somebody telling them what to do, they see it as somebody working with them to develop their skills in a meaningful way and that, coming from a school, is absolutely fantastic because we're changing how that young person sees the school environment, which is so hard.

Alex Holsgrove Jones (12:55)

That is such good feedback though, isn't it? Because you know, to change a child's behaviour to wanting to come to school because something is different is therefore making them engaged in the school environment and in the world of work that they may not have, but for your program, they may not have ever engaged. That story in itself is making such a meaningful difference too. Even if it's just to one or two children, that's worth it.

Gilly Samuddin (13:13)

Any child we make a difference to genuinely means the world to us because it can transform the way they go into the world of work, that transforms kind of how the local communities interact. It's absolutely fantastic and I think yeah, we shout about it as much as we can.

Alex Holsgrove Jones (13:40)

I think you made such a valid point earlier as well about it's not just the young people that benefit. You talk a lot about the young people's confidence improving, but I think from a volunteer's perspective, their confidence can improve as well. There are lots of people I've spoken to who've said that they weren't really that confident speaking to children because, you know, it was a while since they were one and maybe if they don't have their own child, they think perhaps that the special skills required to read with a child, but actually having that experience has been really valuable to them. So, I don't think we can underestimate from either side.

Gilly Samuddin (14:18)

We do provide full training for everyone that gets involved. And I think that's really important. That is what makes it different. It's not just a programme that you find online, you log into, and you're expected to go off and do.  

We see our volunteers, our business partners as essential to the support we can provide. So yeah, we give full training on how to engage with the person, how to get the most out of the volunteering yourself as a volunteer. So yeah, you need no experience. You don't need to have kids of your own. We support you, we hold your hand as much as you want along the way. And most volunteers go in and they go, actually, it's not as bad as I thought. The kids really wanted to hear from me, and they do. They are absolutely fascinated by speaking to people who are in the workplace. They are fascinated to hear the different journeys that the volunteers have had getting into the job they have, because teachers can only impart what they know, in exactly as I felt, I didn't know what the world of work was like in a practical sense until I left teaching.  

So, to be able to give these stories to children, to young people about the realistic pathways into different sectors, the challenges, I think that's really important to be honest about. Work is given the word work for a reason, there are going to be challenges along the way, but to prepare them for that and to build a positive kind of view for a young person around that I think is absolutely fantastic. So, it's not just you mentioned before about it being a nice to have. It's not just a nice to have. I think actually it's incredibly important for businesses to invest in community engagement, volunteering opportunities for staff as a, yeah, as kind of a pathway into their sector.

We need to be showing young people hands-on ways into the world of work.

Alex Holsgrove Jones (16:12)

Yeah, I completely agree. But there are those sort of tensions aren't there because obviously, you're a charity, you rely on volunteers from the business community. And we know businesses are juggling commercial pressures, talent challenges, and lots of competing priorities. So amongst your volunteers, do you sense any tension between wanting to deliver on commercial outcomes and also wanting to contribute to your programs?

Gilly Samuddin (16:39)

Yeah, so it's a really interesting question, actually and being completely honest, we have seen some challenges with our business partners stepping back over the last couple of years because of competing priorities. So, there are also organisations that have a change of focus, they're not looking at supporting their communities, it is that they need to focus financially on making a profit and because of that, some of our business, we do charge a small service fee to access the programs, which goes directly into the training and the program support. We're completely not for profit. But there are businesses that can't afford to financially contribute.  

So, I do see those challenges and I completely appreciate it. But what's interesting on the other side of it is actually many of the businesses we work with, and particularly the volunteers themselves, those are actually doing the programmes see it as something that enhances the business's priorities, it supports commercial activities, it doesn't compete with them. You do need to have that holistic view on things. We completely appreciate businesses are under pressure, but getting involved in programmes like this, like you said before, is boosting staff wellbeing, their confidence, their communication skills, strengthens team culture because our career mentoring is a team volunteering activity. It's not something volunteers do in isolation and that's really important. There's learning and development that's happening that, yes, it's away from the workplace, but it's building those skills in a different environment, which can enhance your work life and give you that respite and that little moment away from the computer in many instances.

Stepping away from that day to day really helps you build new skills, new sense of purpose. And I think the volunteers themselves know what a contribution that has to the local kind of communities and that's great for the business. I think businesses need to look away from it as a, we need to do something with local kids. We'll just tick that box. We'll go in, we're talking in assembly, we'll walk away and there are businesses that say, kind of, we shouldn't have to pay to do any of that and I get that and if you have the time, and the inclination to organise it, great, go ahead, do it. We'd never try and force ourselves on anyone. But the schools and the young people we support are often in communities that are more challenging to engage with.

Potentially the schools are facing a huge number of internal challenges and actually picking up the phone to a business who's saying, ‘I want to send kind of 10 of my staff in to talk to your kids. Can you organise it for me?’ And the school goes, no, what, we don't have time. We don't have energy. We don't have a member of staff who can do that. And that's where we sit in this picture. We're that bridge between the two. We do all the organising. We save you that time, which again is better for the business because you're not sat there doing emails and the number of times school change dates or...kids are off ill or even the business volunteers are off ill and they can't do this, that and the other. We support the whole programme.  

The programmes themselves are structured, they're time-bound, so you can see where they fit in, you can plan it into your diary, which is really important. You work with us and yeah, there will always be things that come up. We unfortunately can't predict everything, but we can do the best possible job that we can to reduce any of those challenges that businesses face and yeah, you are also supporting those communities that are harder to engage with naturally. So, it's not just the school that's on your doorstep, which might have 101 businesses going to them. We're trying to get to those schools who don't have anyone picking up the phone saying, we'd like to work with you and those are the kids that really benefit and need that support.

Alex Holsgrove Jones (20:34)

The kids in most need are getting and the volunteers are only spending their time volunteering. There's no admin.  

Gilly Samuddin (20:41)

Exactly.

Alex Holsgrove Jones (20:34)

So yeah, that’s for everyone. So obviously a lot's been going on at Ablaze. You've recently stepped into the CEO position, which is obviously a really exciting moment for you personally, but also for the organisation. So, what's in store for your next chapter? And what are the priorities or ambitions that you're most excited about?

Gilly Samuddin (21:08)

Gosh, I'm excited by everything actually. It genuinely has been one of the most exciting, challenging maybe, but exciting things I've ever done stepping up in the last six months. Personally, I don't want to change too much too quickly, I'm trying to be sure and steady because our programmes work, we have fantastic business partners. My focus for the next 12 months and beyond is to deepen and enhance our relationships with our business partners because without them we can't deliver our programmes. There is an increased and growing demand for support both in primary, secondary and beyond so we know there's a need but what we want to also do is make sure that our programmes stay relevant and the best support that we can offer both for the business and for the schools and young people.

Actually, since September, since I've stepped up, we have started to reshape some of our programmes to make them even more impactful, I guess you could say. The core is still the same. What we do, our aims, our missions has not changed. But we've listened to feedback from businesses about making the programmes fit around the working day more, about being more aware of time sensitivities, things like that and we've listened to schools as well about what their students need from our programmes. So, we've refreshed our career mentoring program. We've still got a few programmes on our core programme running through this year, but we are adapting as we go. So, there's a lot more flexibility to the programmes that we've embedded in them and we want to strengthen the support with that. That's very exciting and we're looking at the coaching for Key Stage 5, so the sixth form students, and that's based on what schools want.  

It's also what businesses want. They want to be working with those young people who are ready for the workplace, ready for that next step with the right support. But it's not just career mentoring we're looking at. Actually, this year is the National Year of Reading, which is highly exciting, particularly for us with a kind of a reading programme on our books. So, what we're also doing this year is launching a new program, Books for All, which is an after-school reading club.

We're starting with a couple of our schools, actually Evergreen, who the TLT volunteers are working with. It's going to be an after-school reading club for children, part of our reading partners programme to do with their families. So, it's specifically for children who have English as an additional language, who are not getting feedback from the school. This is not getting as much practice reading aloud at home as they would benefit from. Sometimes parents don't know how to support the children best.

So yeah, we're going to do an article club. We're going to make it fun. We're going to have a treasure box of books each session. So, the kids are finding books that excite them and inspire them. We want to build their confidence both for the kids and the family. So yeah, that actually, if you're talking about things I'm excited about this year is probably one of the things I'm most excited about. But yeah, like I said, it's building and deepening our partnerships. We, for our 20th anniversary last year, established a volunteer committee a group of six volunteers from our business part of the community, we've got a TLT representative on there, and they have been supporting us with fundraising and looking at ways of raising awareness of the impact of our work both with businesses and schools. So, I want to support the work that they're doing. That's the other thing that I think if we can share our message, share from the volunteer perspective, from the business perspective, share within our communities the impact, building that community around us, that's what I want to do, that's what my priority is for the future. It's not about growth in a big, geographical sense it's about supporting as many young people as we can with the best possible programmes we can with businesses that care as much as we do. So that's my kind of my dream, my vision.

Alex Holsgrove Jones (25:12)

Wow, no, that's amazing, Gilly. You know, to be honest, the afterschool reading club sounds like it would be great for everyone's wellbeing.

Gilly Samuddin (25:21)

I really hope so. I'm very excited. I'm definitely going to be going along to each of our pilot sessions and I'll let you know how it goes.

Alex Holsgrove Jones (25:28)

Great, so you've covered a lot there and I'm sure many of our listeners will be feeling really inspired.  Definitely I find it a really uplifting chat but if you could ask our listeners to do one thing to support opportunities for young people in their communities, what would it be?

Gilly Samuddin (25:46)

I’d say take one step, do one thing, Genuinely one thing can make a huge difference for a young person so you don't have to be an expert, you don't have to have huge amounts of time or anything like that. What you need is a passion for supporting young people. Every week I'm finding out about a new job, a new area that's kind of mind blowing for me. But I think we all have, we have a social responsibility to support the next generation. I think we genuinely have that responsibility in the world of work, businesses really can make a huge difference. So yeah, if everyone listening did just one thing, ideally got in touch with Ablaze, but yeah, just do one thing to support a young person. They are the future workforce; they are going to be making kind of the world a better place going forwards. But yeah, we could make a huge impact in our local communities and I think for me, it's think local, support young people, make a difference. But yeah, one thing one step at a time would be great.

Alex Holsgrove Jones (26:49)

Great, thanks, Gilly. And thank you so much for joining us today and for sharing details of the wonderful work that Ablaze does and the profound ripple effects it really has on young people, volunteers and the wider community. So, thank you so much.

Gilly Samuddin (27:04)

Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity. I really appreciate it.

Alex Holsgrove Jones (27:07)

And thank you to our listeners for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe and share. And until next time, keep driving positive change and putting ESG into action.

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