Empowerment Through Action

Encouragement runs out. It costs nothing to give, and once you have heard it, it asks nothing of you. What it cannot do is teach you anything. It will not explain how money actually behaves from one month to the next, or help you describe a career you cannot yet name, or show you how to lead people when nobody has ever asked you to. All of that has to be learned. Learning it takes teaching, practice, and somebody who will be honest with you about where you are starting from.

We are Bloom & Become, in London, and two of our programmes exist to do exactly that: the Employability & Enterprise Hub and the Leadership & Confidence Academy. Empowerment begins to mean something when it turns into a subject, a time, and somebody expecting you. Action is what turns encouragement into change, and it only counts as action if you can actually take part.

Our Employability & Enterprise Hub is for economic independence. It is built around skill-based learning: employability support, entrepreneurship training if you are trying to build a business of your own, and practical sessions on money habits and career clarity. The subjects are ordinary, and that is deliberate. A good deal of what stands between you and more control over your own money is information nobody has sat down and given you.

Our Leadership & Confidence Academy is built the same way: practical learning experiences for women, run by experienced facilitators. Leadership here is not a subject to admire from a distance. It is work you will have to do yourself, and work that can be taught.

A skill you have heard about is not a skill yet. You find out what you actually know when you try to use it: when you write the covering letter, set the price, put the numbers in a row, or say the thing you rehearsed to a room that talks back. That is the part most people skip, because it is the part where you find out.

So the sessions are made to be practised in, and the mentoring is there for afterwards. You also meet other people working on something similar, which sounds minor until you have spent a while as the only person you know asking these questions.

A programme you cannot take part in is not an opportunity, whatever else it is. So the programmes are meant to be inclusive, the facilitators are experienced, and the support is personalised rather than one shape for everyone. Nobody is expected to arrive already halfway competent.

Our Wellbeing & Community Support Circles are there for the weeks when a workshop is not what you need. Sometimes what helps is a plan. Sometimes it is somewhere to say out loud that you are tired.