EduKit’s CEO vision – Past, present and future…
Nathalie RIchards
CEO & Co-founder of EduKit
Hey there,
I’m CEO and co-founder of EduKit and this is my inaugural post for the newly relaunched EduKit Connect site. This will be a regular fixture for the site – I hope that you enjoy my musings.
For this first post, I thought it would be useful to remind readers about the origins of EduKit and how far we have come since our humble beginnings in my bedroom just 6 years ago.
I had just left my previous career as a Project manager and business consultant where I’d helped to implement lots of big technology projects for big, international corporates. But privately I yearned to do something with more purpose and impact, something that would help the next generation to be able to overcome any adversities they faced and achieve their potential. Something scalable and potentially ground breaking. As a black woman who had had a reasonably successful career, in large part thanks to the support that I’d benefited from as a teenager, I always felt compelled to pay it forward and support the next generation in a similar way. So in parallel with my career, I became a youth mentor with organisations like Young Enterprise and the 100 Black Men of London and a board member at Generating Genius and Virgin Unite. And this provided a unique insight into the challenges that schools and youth organisations faced.
EduKit was born of a realisation that despite the plethora of interventions and support available for children and young adults, there was no meaningful way to connect the support available with those who needed it most, nor any easy way to gather and analyse data on the needs of students the impact of interventions on their development. EduKit seeks to address these issues with a powerful, freemium online service that helps schools to understand and improve the wellbeing of students. And over the last 6 years we’ve grown from a mere idea to an award-winning social enterprise supporting hundreds of schools in the UK and beyond.
So that’s where we’ve come from – but what are we are trying to do now? Well, with the relaunch of EduKit Connect, we are taking our vision to the next level and are intent on ensuring that teachers, Educators and youth providers are able to come together to share ideas, resources and concerns in order to ensure that all children are able to achieve their potential. We also run schoolsimprovement.net – the UK’s leading education news site, which enables us to reach even more schools and education influencers. With a huge combined reach, we want to play a key part in improving the wellbeing and mental of our youth and to use our audience of tens of thousands of teachers and education influencers to elevate the agenda of schools and school leaders.
So I’d like to personally invite you to support our vision by posting your thoughts, ideas, issues and stories, and inviting others from your networks to do the same. You can also sign up for our daily deals to get free services for your students and schools and use EduKit Connect to discover or nominate great services. I’d also encourage you to make full use of our free student wellbeing surveys and support for your schools by signing up here.
Happy children are more likely to become happy people. We’re on a mission to help transform education but it’s a team effort and we’re looking forward to collaborating with you and others to help us to get there.
Thanks!
Nathalie
