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Back Her Business helps Loughborough’s female entrepreneurs access funding

Back Her Business helps Loughborough’s female entrepreneurs access funding

A Loughborough-based entrepreneur behind a website to help create accessible housing for those most in need, is just one of the 152 projects in the Midlands and East of England who has benefitted from NatWest’s innovative Back Her Business crowdfunding platform over the last 12 months.

Jodie Warren, founder of Social Mortgage, an online platform dedicated to helping people purchase their own properties by connecting them with like-minded people, is using Back Her Business to raise a target of £1,250 of funding. If successful she will receive £500 of additional funding from NatWest to support her campaign.

Back Her Business supports female entrepreneurs by helping and encouraging more women to start and fund their own businesses in the early stages.

Since launching in 2019, it has helped 152 projects led by female entrepreneurs in the Midlands and East of England. To date NatWest has pledged £174,000 for these programmes.

The programme has been developed in partnership with Crowdfunder and forms part of NatWest’s wider commitment to reduce the gender gap when it comes to entrepreneurship, by supporting the creation of a further 400,000 female-led businesses by 2025.

Female-led businesses

Over the next 12 months, NatWest hopes to help even more female-led businesses in Loughborough and the Midlands secure business funding through Back Her Business.

Jodie will use the funding to develop the Social Mortgage website further, creating a more advanced interactive platform which brings users together with experts, products and services all in one place.

The aim is to focus on supporting those with disabilities that struggle with accessibility issues around housing and independent living, as well as service and ex-service people and the emergency services, NHS workers and careers.

Jodie has recently been nominated for the Entrepreneur of Excellence award at the National Diversity Awards reflecting her unwavering ambition to provide accessible housing for everyone and help tackle the housing crisis.

Jodie said:

“I founded Social Mortgage not to make a profit, but to help those that needed it most. The finance from Back Her Business will allow us to upgrade the original website built by me, and hopefully facilitate the purchase of the .com domain name as we look to launch the website globally.

“Back Her Business is a brilliant platform that allows you to meet new people, build your confidence, showcase and validate your idea, build up your early stage marketing and see things from a new perspective.

“Going forward, we know that our aim is to buy properties and make them accessible for those with disabilities. This is a whole hidden housing crisis in the UK and we want to be able to provide funding for property adaptations (the average cost per house is around £50,000) because living independently is a basic human right that is being taken away from many.”

Back Her Business launched in March 2019 following NatWest’s Rose Review, which revealed £250 billion could be added to the UK economy if women started and scaled businesses at the same rate as men. The Government backed report also highlighted that only one in three entrepreneurs are female.

 

Heather Waters, Enterprise Manager at NatWest, said:

"A year on from the launch of the UK’s first female-only crowdfunding platform, we are successfully supporting entrepreneurs like Jodie by providing them with industry-leading advice and mentorship.

 

"We have already helped a number of women in the Midlands drive forward their entrepreneurial ideas and business growth and we will continue to support entrepreneurs in the region and across the country going forward."

To find out more information about Back Her Business go to: www.natwestbackherbusiness.co.uk/


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