Opening The Door on Closing The Community Skills Gap

Plentific and Beam announce a partnership today that will support homeless people to get into skilled work, creating new opportunities while helping address skills shortages.

Beam is a London-based social enterprise that crowdfunds employment training for homeless people and supports them into skilled work - often in the trades. Beam is funded by The Mayor of London and leading UK tech entrepreneurs.

Plentific is a London-based, scaling technology business that brings modern property management tools together with a marketplace of verified trade professionals through a simple, powerful online platform.

Plentific is dedicated to supporting individuals on the Beam platform to gain qualifications and employment in a trade.

How the partnership works:

1. Homeless charities including Shelter and St Mungo’s, refer homeless people looking to get into skilled work to the Beam platform.
2. The public crowdfunds each homeless person’s employment training at beam.org. A Beam caseworker supports them through training and into work.   
3. Plentific will fund 10% of a homeless person’s campaign each month and use its extensive network to help surface work experience and employment opportunities.

Why we’re doing this:

Plentific is on a mission to make housing better for everyone. We work with social housing organisations to improve repairs and maintenance work - and with it open big company contracts to local businesses. We believe that can not only make things better for our clients and their tenants - but for local communities too.

Beam’s innovative platform makes it easy for anyone to help a homeless person for the long-term by funding their training. Beam’s approach is highly collaborative - taking referrals from charities, training people at leading third party providers and placing them with local employers. Beam is excited to partner with innovative mission-driven tech startups like Plentific.

We see this partnership as a great opportunity to bring Beam, Plentific - and our partner organisations - both Trade Professionals and Housing Organisations together. We want to highlight the opportunities in the trades for disadvantaged people to do rewarding, skilled work, fulfil their potential and support communities.