Housing charity Peabody is responsible for 109,000 homes and 220,000 residents across London and the home counties. It provides homes and housing services, making a positive impact in communities. Abraham Williams leads the enterprise team for Peabody’s Community Foundation, as part of the wider economic inclusion team. Here, he explains his role and the reasons for joining forces with Allia Impact.
What is Peabody’s mission?
Within the team, our focus is to see how we can leverage economic opportunities across our supply chain and those of our partners. One of the ways we do this is working with business support groups such as Allia Impact across our different London communities. We aim to help founders start and then grow their enterprises with tailored support. But with Allia Impact, the partnership of our support has broadened and become richer in terms of business support at the idea stage. Allia’s support has been invaluable. Even though we just started with a few pilot schemes, we’ve already seen the difference it has made to the residents who are looking to create their own start-up.
How has Allia Impact helped Peabody deliver on its goals?
One of the things I really like about Allia Impact’s work is the innovation that comes into how we work with businesses. For example, the concept of the community days are really brilliant. It’s clear that the Allia Impact team is focused on delivering a thorough programme, carefully designed to help people think through their ideas, and then to take them from ideas into something real that can have a really strong social impact. That’s really important for us at Peabody, as that focus on enterprise delivery and business support is something we’re aligned on. We’re both committed to working with businesses and community groups across our areas, supporting our residents to help them flourish, and working with Allia has helped us do that in a very focused and impactful way.
How can Allia and Peabody continue to work together to support businesses?
We’re seeing how we can build a partnership to go beyond ideation, to growth stage businesses further along the enterprise journey. The real impact of the partnership will be seen in those that we take beyond just launching their businesses. If they can stand on their own, perhaps they can become businesses that help others to navigate the enterprise journey.