A back-to-work programme with a community at its heart
Through Belina Consulting, Liz Sewell runs GRoW—Get Ready for Work—a programme that helps parents build confidence, motivation, and employability skills. It combines practical learning with support from people on a similar journey: the programme helps participants prepare for work, while the community gives them somewhere to exchange opportunities, encouragement, and experiences.
When lockdown closed the doors
GRoW had delivered its work through visits to community centres and libraries until lockdown stopped those meetings. Zoom kept the team talking, but it did not provide a continuing home for learning resources, events, job opportunities, and informal support.
The programme also works with people who may feel vulnerable, so access had to be controlled and the service simple enough to use without exposing members through public social media. Liz wanted an app but not the job of building and maintaining the technology herself. As she reasoned at the time, if Tesco can have an app, why not GRoW? Disciple offered an invitation-only, branded platform that could bring the whole programme together.
An invitation-only home for the programme
The GRoW app holds learning content, job bulletins, events, workshops, and a calendar. Live streams support formal sessions and informal gatherings alike—including virtual coffees and live-streamed picnics—and push notifications keep the programme visible between sessions. Members can find resources at any time, share opportunities, and talk with people working through the same return-to-work process. For Liz, the result carries the organisation further than its size suggests: "The ease of use, the intuition, makes it as easy as anything I've ever done on Apple. The app makes us look good. It makes us look how we want to look, which is bigger than our funding profile."
Support that outlasts the programme
Liz has seen some participants move from using the service once a month to once a day—the continuity that had been lost when in-person visits stopped. "It's upped my staff's game," she says. "It's helped people understand what we do better. For our candidates it's better." The app helped GRoW win an Innovation Award in 2021 and drew interest from organisations that wanted to contribute content. 90% of members keep the app after it has helped them return to work: some share vacancies and stories from new roles, others stay for the friendships and everyday encouragement they found along the way.
