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It takes a village to build a business.
And it takes a village to advocate that anybody can do it.
Today, we launch our first cohort of Hatch Enterprise Ambassadors. They are entrepreneurs who are living proof of Hatch’s impact on the trajectory of businesses across the country. Champions of inclusive access to entrepreneurship just like us.
Over the next 12 months, our brilliant Ambassadors will work with us to shape our community, acting as advocates for why the support we offer is so vital.
Between them, our Ambassadors have experience taking part in every level of programme that Hatch has to offer, from ‘newbies’ in the entrepreneurial space, to seasoned entrepreneurial professionals who gained the capacity to scale their businesses with us by their side.
Albert Larter
Albert began his entrepreneurial journey during the 2020 lockdown.
In six years, Albert and his co-founder have built a thriving marketplace for unique products from African and Caribbean brands called Wakuda, which now operates both online and offline marketplaces.
Since joining a Hatch programme, Wakuda has expanded its network of brands from 300 to 500+, and increased its revenue from £40,000 in 2023 to a projected £250,000 in 2026.
Albert is an active member of our alumni network, giving back to other entrepreneurs in those earlier stages of business development by offering feedback as a friendly dragon at our end-of-programme Demo Days.
Gwendoline Thornton
Gwendoline is an experienced designer and manufacturer whose business began in 2024, in a shed in Essex with one soldering iron and a lot of ambition. Today, THE.WORKSHOP are a team of designers, machinists and makers who design, prototype and manufacture hardware, plastic toys and assistive technology.
Gwendoline is a graduate of our inaugural Launchpad programme that was especially designed for Disabled entrepreneurs.
Because of Hatch, Gwendoline had the runway to achieve incredible upward growth. THE.WORKSHOP have now worked on over 700 projects, including an exciting new toy line with designs that will be commercially licensed to manufacturers internationally.
THE.WORKSHOP is now a King’s Trust Business, recognised for manufacturing excellence and innovation, and Gwendoline has spoken at the Houses of Parliament on Design & Technology Education.
Joshua King
Joshua is the founder of Build & Elevate, a social enterprise that empowers young people and career changers through hands-on construction training, education, and progression into stable employment.
The business delivers an impressive range of construction services to clients, alongside running low-cost specialised training programmes. He’s built something that serves as a perfect example of how profit and purpose can coincide and complement one another towards a better world.
Elena Lo Presti
Elena established her Community Interest Company, Craft Forward, in 2022. Her ambition is to provide accessible, creative experiences that are suitable for all, supporting community mental health through ‘slow-making and slow-thinking practices’.
Elena is a strong believer that arts and crafts can be a powerful catalyst for social change. One of the organisation’s main social impact initiatives is ‘Blankets for the World’.
Every winter, crafty local communities come together to create handmade blankets for people experiencing houselessness.
Krystal Parkins
Krystal comes to Hatch’s Ambassador cohort as an advocate for our approach to personal development and accessibility on our programmes.
She is the founder of Proud To Be Me, a Community Interest Company with prevention at its centre – working to reduce county lines exploitation and violence against women and girls.
The organisation support LGBTQ+ young people, particularly those from Black Asian and marginalised communities, primarily through youth groups and workshops.
Lewis Kay
Lewis is the founder of Esports Youth Club, a London-based not-for-profit setting up high-spec gaming spaces in community venues.
9/10 young people in the UK play video games, so Esports Youth Club meets them where they’re at, providing free sessions that create safe spaces for young people to enjoy.
The organisation has experienced outstanding growth since Lewis participated in a Hatch programme in late 2024. Esports Youth Clubs delivered sessions have doubled, from 167 to 383, and, with them, 1,607 unique young people have attended sessions across the year, double the number reported in 2024.
Csilla Gindorf
Csilla has been Hatch alumni since 2022, after joining Hatch, where she developed and launched the concept of her functional nutrition brand Lucid. The brand make clean, natural products using mushrooms and herbs like Lions Mane, Reishi and L-Theanine.
Fast forward four years, and Lucid has grown from a micro-brand with 20 stockists to a boutique brand with 120 stockists across the country.
Csilla lives with an autoimmune condition and is passionate about helping other entrepreneurs with long-term health conditions build something sustainable. In just a few years, Csilla has blossomed into a strong and capable business leader – a truly exceptional example of how access to the right resources at the beginning can have a lifelong impact.
Michael Spooner
Michael’s relationship with Hatch spans more than 5 years. He values our community as one of the most consistently inspiring, inclusive, and practically valuable ecosystems he’s been part of as an entrepreneur.
Michael’s company, M A Spooner Ltd, is a specialist business analysis and advisory company working with Government, Local Authorities, commercial organisations and social enterprises to influence thinking, policy, and practice.
His experience on a Hatch programme refined M A Spooner Ltd’s offer, enabled Michael to reach new clients and improved his personal confidence as an individual and business leader.
Michael lost his sight at a young age. It forced him to adapt his life to overcome adversity and lit a fire in him to inspire and encourage others to take control of their disability or barriers, not letting them hold them back.
Emma Quartey
Emma is the founder of the alternative schooling company Finding The Flex. She’s fighting for a future where all adults with a duty of care in education can work together to respond effectively to the needs of each individual child.
The organisation work with local authorities and schools to offer ‘flexischooling’, a hybrid schooling arrangement that provides an alternative to traditional ways of tackling non-attendance at school. With flexischooling, children receive a full-time education that benefits the well-being of children, their families, and their schools.
Hatch taught Emma how to understand and tackle the real-world challenges of starting and running a small business, and helped her build a business that can sustainably balance the need for profit with the desire to make the maximum social impact.
James McIntosh
James is a multi-programme graduate and founder of global knitting and haberdashery business McIntosh. When James joined our community in 2024, McIntosh was turning over £30,000.
Now, the business is turning over £150,000 and counting.
James embodies so many of our values here at Hatch. Whilst McIntosh is a successful business in its own right, James uses the platform to support people’s well-being through ‘knititation’, a concept which saved his life after he experienced ‘a catatonic state’ and depression as a result of homophobic abuse experienced in his previous career.
James joins our Ambassador community ready to give others the confidence he’s built back up within his own life, sharing our commitment to nurturing everybody’s individual idea of what success looks like.
Charles Harris
Charles is another longstanding Hatch alumni, joining us in 2023 and taking part in three different Hatch programmes throughout the lifespan of his business, knus. The Community Interest Company is a volunteer-led mental health support organisation that provides free support services to tackle struggles with anxiety, low mood, loneliness, stress, or specific life challenges.
Charles founded knus following a severe mental health breakdown, using his lived experience to build technology that could deliver timely, accessible mental health support to others.
Funding from the Hatch Fund allowed Charles to build software that better supported his team of volunteers and provided emergency food or transport for those in crisis. He also attributes a 520% increase in business turnover to what he learned with Hatch.
Bethany Whiteley
Bethany joins our Ambassador cohort after Hatch had a monumental impact on her. Since graduating, she’s implemented efficient systems in her business and learned to trust her intuition when making business decisions.
She is the founder of BB Broadway, a SEN-inclusive theatre school for babies and young children. The organisation focuses on delivering gender-neutral classes that remove outdated stereotypes from the early years education sector.
Bethany’s support from Hatch enabled her to afford big-spend items that helped BB Broadway grow sustainably, implement upskilling opportunities for her team, and make improvements to class access, widening the organisation’s audience.
Anthony Aina
The extraordinary social enterprise Anthony has built is called Penificent. They produce culturally representative comics that use storytelling to empower ‘hard-to-reach’ youth, allowing them to safely explore difficult topics like violence, abuse and mental health issues through stories that feel real and relatable.
Penificent also deliver trauma-informed workshops in schools, Pupil Referral Units and Youth Offending Institutions.
Anthony attributes Penificent’s growth to his experience on a Hatch programme, which helped him transform how he measures and demonstrates Penificent’s impact on the lives of young people.
Since Anthony joined Hatch’s community, Penificent has distributed 600 comics globally and successfully stocked their culturally representative resources at the Wellcome Library and educators’ resource toolkits.
Jessica Edun
Jessica and her sister built The Flygerians with a simple mission to bring Nigerian cuisine to the world.
The sisters’ bubbly personalities have secured the Flygerian brand a 28K following on instagram, so when Jessica came to Hatch with bold plans to grow the business, we could only imagine the future trajectory they would experience.
Since the programme, The Flygerians have opened a new restaurant location and grown their team from 15 to 30.
Ella Williams
Ella joined Hatch when Our Goal was in its early development stage. Her Community Interest Company provides physical activity programmes in schools and local communities across Greater Manchester. To date, the organisation have supported 250 girls across the region.
Our Goal launched their mental and physical well-being programme, EVA, in 2025, following Ella’s Hatch grant at the end of her Incubator programme. The funding was used to upskill Our Goal’s mentors who are delivering the programme across secondary schools in Greater Manchester.
A recent social impact measurement of Our Goal’s impact concluded that every £1 invested into Our Goal creates £6.40 in social value for young people’s physical health and mental well-being.
Toby Radcliffe
Toby joined Hatch last year with a desire to grow the scale and impact of his sustainability consultancy ZeroBees. Since the programme, ZeroBees turnover increased by 33%.
Toby has over 25 years of experience across sustainability and commercial strategy, and his work, through founding and expanding ZeroBees, is helping shift organisations from intention to credible, sustainable action that improves their environmental and social impact.
The action ZeroBees is taking is actively accelerating decarbonisation across SMEs and supply chains.
Meet our Ambassadors
My relationship with Hatch spans more than five years, and during that time it has been one of the most consistently inspiring, inclusive and practically valuable ecosystems I have been part of as an entrepreneur. From the very beginning, Hatch felt different – not just a support organisation, but a genuine community that meets people where they are and helps them move forward with confidence.
Looking ahead, the values I have absorbed through Hatch inclusion, generosity, curiosity and practical action continue to shape the future trajectory of my business.
I’m proud to share my experience as a Hatch Ambassador, helping to amplify the impact of a programme that genuinely empowers entrepreneurs and contributes positively to the… start-up community.
– Michael Spooner, founder of Michael Spooner LTD & Hatch Enterprise Ambassador
Taking part in the Hatch Incubator programme was genuinely transformational for me and my business. From the very beginning, the programme felt like a well-oiled machine, thoughtful, intentional, and designed with real founders in mind.
What really stood out was how practical and values-led Hatch is. The learning wasn’t just theoretical; it was rooted in real business growth, sustainability, and confidence-building. I felt supported as a whole person, not just a business owner, and that made it easier to show up fully and engage deeply with the programme.
– Krystal Parkins, founder of Proud To Be Me CIC & Hatch Enterprise Ambassador
Hatch has been invaluable to my personal growth and the way I lead Lucid. I’ve developed key skills, built meaningful connections with other founders, and found support at every stage of the journey.
Building a business sustainably is something I care deeply about. Living with an autoimmune condition has taught me how to grow something without burning the candle at both ends, and I’m passionate about helping other entrepreneurs do the same.
– Csilla Gindorf, founder of Lucid & Hatch Enterprise Ambassador
One cohort. Fourteen communities served.
To us, inclusive entrepreneurship means serving the people that mainstream enterprise overlooks. Our Hatch Ambassadors’ businesses reach across some of the most marginalised communities in the UK – young people, those living with mental health conditions or physical disabilities, people experiencing homelessness, victims of crime, and many more.
But whilst these outstanding social entrepreneurs are making systems change every day, each of them have their own individual ideal of what success looks like, and this is something we consciously develop within our cohort programmes.
Success for Ella is achieving a £6.40 return in social value for every £1 Our Goal has invested in young girls wellbeing across Greater Manchester. For Csilla, it’s getting Lucid stocked in over 100 places across the country whilst running a business built sustainably around her healthcare needs.
Economic and social impact are not opposites. Hatch Enterprise Ambassadors refuse to choose between them, and that’s exactly what we believe builts a more sustainable, more equitable economy.
Our programmes don’t define what success should look like for each founder. Instead, they create the conditions for each founder to define success for themselves – and then pursue it with the right resources, community and confidence behind them.
What comes next
Over the next 12 months, all Hatch Enterprise Ambassadors will work alongside the Hatch team and our wider alumni community – sharing their experience, shaping our engagement with our alumni and showing up publicly as advocates of what’s possible when the services that Hatch Enterprise provide are openly available to underrepresented entrepreneurs at the moments they need support.
The village that builds a business? We’re still building it. And it’s bigger, more varied, and more extraordinary than we ever imagined.
Explore charity partnerships with Hatch Enterprise
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