About Us

We Help People
Re-Author Themselves

Social inclusion through enterprise — based in Teignmouth, Devon

Grow Inspires is a nonprofit organisation working with people who face the greatest barriers to employment. We believe that working for yourself is one of the most powerful acts of self-determination available to anyone — and that it should be available to everyone.

Where We Started

Grow Inspires grew out of a knowledge exchange partnership between the University of Bristol and a small group of people who had experienced first-hand what it means to be written off by the system. Our co-founder Eleri was a self-made business owner who lost everything and left prison with £43 and the advice that waitressing was her best option. She knew differently. So did Mark, who had spent years working with people across the world whose potential was constrained not by lack of ability, but by lack of opportunity to express it.

Together they built Phoenix — a programme that started with ex-offenders and the long-term unemployed, and proved that when people are given real agency over their working lives, remarkable things happen. That insight is now at the heart of everything Grow Inspires does.

What Drives Us

🏷️ The Label Problem

Society defines people by their past. We help them define themselves by their potential. The label that has followed someone — whatever it is — does not have to be the last word on who they are.

💎 Hidden Talent

The people we work with have remarkable skills. Skills that conventional employers don’t know how to value, but that customers will pay for. Our job is to help make that value obvious.

🔓 Real Agency

We don’t prescribe what people should do. We create the conditions for them to figure it out for themselves — because that’s what actually works. You are the expert on your own life.

Grounded in Evidence

Our approach isn’t guesswork. The Phoenix programme has been the subject of peer-reviewed research published in the American Journal of Management, examining why this way of working succeeds where conventional employment support so often fails.

The research found that every single person who completed Phoenix became economically active. Not because they were taught a curriculum, but because they were given the agency to define their own path.

Read the Research