"Our building needed repairs and our funding applications were put on hold."

Tell us about your organisation?

Kashmir Youth Project (KYP) was established in 1979, to provide advice and support to people – particularly from an Asian background – who had lost their jobs and needed to apply for benefits following the decline of the textile industry in Greater Manchester.

Today, we work across various communities and across age groups, and with businesses too. We still offer bilingual welfare advice, often to people facing language or digital skills barriers, but we also provide a number of other services in line with our employment focus. These include accredited training, child and elderly care, and a managed workspace for young, growing companies and voluntary sector groups.

How do you make a difference?

Our work is about social and economic regeneration. And much of it involves supporting people from different communities to integrate, by overcoming obstacles around language, skills, caring for dependents, and simply navigating the processes many of us take for granted.

Many people in Greater Manchester are the children or grandchildren of immigrants. Often they are in unskilled employment, then later find themselves looking for other opportunities. We run programmes that help them develop the skills to make that shift, including accredited Level 1 and 2 courses in Maths, English, childcare, and health and social care. Our centre includes state-of-the-art learning facilities too.

Some of the Ukrainian refugees we’re working with are highly skilled. One is an engineer who can’t get work because of the language barrier, so we’re providing him with an accredited English course. With no end to the conflict in sight, it’s important that refugees like him are able to get on with their lives.

And the quicker people learn skills, the quicker they can start contributing to the economy and society.

How did social investment help you?

We lost most of our tenants due to COVID. Our building needed repairs and our funding applications were put on hold. GMCVO (Greater Manchester Centre for Voluntary Organisation) worked with us to identify a loan that would help sustain our activities and update our facilities post-COVID.

One problem we faced was that we could no longer secure funding for our accredited skills programmes because our track record was no longer up-to-date.

"The loan enabled us to run the programmes, paying for the trainers and tutors, so we could re-build that track record and expertise back up, to the point where we can now apply for funding again."

We also faced challenges around cash flow, because many of the programmes or projects we rely on pay us in arrears, 3-6 months after delivery. The loan helped us bridge these gaps. Without it, we couldn’t have sustained our services or provided new services to emerging users such as Afghan and Ukranian refugees.

GMCVO have also supported us as we look at our mission and vision, and pointed us towards new sources of funding. They’ve helped us look at our energy efficiency too, after our bills increased by 400%.

It’s a really good relationship; we’ve got expertise they haven’t got and have supported them when working with black and minority ethnic social enterprises. So it’s a giving relationship that works both ways.

Established in 1979, KYP is dedicated to engaging and working with local people and the diverse communities of Rochdale for the social and economic development of the borough.

What does the future look like for KYP?

We’ve got new funding applications in the pipeline for when our current funding runs out. Our nursery has doubled in size, providing important revenue. And we’re looking at recurring grant income, so we don’t lose valuable skills every time funding ends and we can no longer employ someone.

Without social investment, we wouldn’t be in a position to do any of this.

We now want to diversify into other areas, such as health. There are a lot of health inequalities across the groups we work with, particularly the Kashmiri community. We’ve started working with Public Health Rochdale to explore how we can begin to address these inequalities, building on the experience and trust we have with communities.

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→ Duration: 5 years → Turnover: £539,699 → Amount invested: £125,000 (Loan) and £25,000 (Grant) → Product type: Blended finance - part grant, part loan → Programme: Emergency Lending

To find out more about social investment and how it could support your organisation, visit Good Finance.

To find out more about Access - The Foundation for Social Investment, visit our website.