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Social adVentures

Organisation Summary

Business Sector:Health and Social Care

Business Activities:Community development, education, healthy living

Business Location:Salford

Chief Executive:Scott Darraugh

Turnover:£1m

Employees:40

Legal structure:Industrial and Provident Society

Website:www.socialadventures.org.uk

Social adVentures

Social adVentures is a health and wellbeing organisation, which provides services and opportunities to inspire local people to lead happier and healthier lives.

It consists of a Healthy Living Centre (The Angel Centre), a social prescribing service, a community mental health garden (Garden Needs), a community café, children’s day nurseries and forest schools, a community gym and a forest school training centre.

Social adVentures offers a mix of service delivery around the needs of the community and social businesses. The surplus from these social businesses gives the organisation freedom to be innovative in designing and delivering new services based around the needs of the communities it works in.

The team works with some of the city’s most hard to reach groups. Services are diverse and range from healthy cooking classes to crisis management psychological sessions.

Social adVentures is jointly owned by service users, its employees and local Salford people.

Originally set up as The Angel Healthy Living Centre, it was hosted by NHS Salford for ten years. During recent years, the organisation has developed its services whilst becoming a social enterprise, through the Department of Health’s Right to Request scheme.

Social adVentures has led on research to help itself and the other NHS ‘spin-out’ organisations achieve better access to investment, including how to facilitate acquisitions, and leading innovation in contracting (e.g. payment by results contracts).

It continues to be a leader in community based, person centred approaches. The organisation reacted quickly during the Covid pandemic, giving up a centre as a Covid triage centre and diverting resources to food preparation for the NHS, combatting loneliness and food poverty in the local community.

A growing leader in outdoor education, as well as providing a full-time forest school pre-school, the team also delivers high quality primary education outdoors. Their newest venture of forest school training is quickly growing to become a local centre of excellence.

E3M Member

Social adVentures

Name:Scott Darraugh

Title :CEO

In 2010, Scott became Chief Executive of Social adVentures after leading his team of public health specialists out of the NHS in Salford to create one of the country’s first NHS public service mutuals. Social adVentures is a wellbeing social enterprise with the aim of inspiring people to lead healthy and happy lives.

In 2012 Social adVentures won the RBS SE100 Index ‘Growth Champion’ Award, having achieved a 262% growth in annual turnover. For over 8 years, Scott was the Director in public health in Salford, leading on innovative, community based programmes in some of the area’s most deprived neighbourhoods.

In 2013 Scott became a Mutuals Ambassador, working with the cabinet office to shape policies which will encourage the development of mutuals delivering public services. A specific area of focus is the development of innovate financial products which will address the specific needs of the mutuals sector to support further growth.