Our Mission
We rise by lifting others
Our mission is twofold.
Offering support to individuals and the local community.
Our mission is twofold – to showcase the skills and employability of people who identify as being neurodiverse, autistic or have a learning disability and to support our local community who may be experiencing food poverty along with the promotion of fresh cooking.
We believe that people learn by doing and so learning how to be employed is best being learnt by exposing them to the work environment. Lily’s provides this real working environment for learning opportunities in a practical way. People are guided as they go through the programme with room to make mistakes and reflect on how this would be managed in the future. Although we are nurturing we are working to replicate a mainstream workplace so they can move onto employment with one of our partner businesses.
We use our cafes, coffee shops, catering business and office as the spaces to provide the real work training and development. The aim is to have every part of the business ran by one of our trainees supported by our amazing team who are all experts in the areas in which they work. For those who have an aspiration of paid work we then work to support them into work placements which we hope will provide them with long term, sustainable employment.
Most of the cafes run as community spaces, providing space for local groups, some have community fridges, most are run on a donation basis to ensure they are accessible for everyone. We are developing cookery sessions following some funding from hubbub to support our local communities with cooking fresh food.
Interested in applying for Internship?
Find out which programmes & opportunities we have
