I wouldn’t be where I am today without Edventure

Ben Goodey shares his story:

When I first joined Edventure I had made the decision to change my path in life from one of sitting in an office, bored, to one filled with things that I was interested in and passionate about and ideally one that had a positive impact on other people.

I had always wanted to start my own social enterprise, so I started looking for ways to make that happen. Edventure was the first step towards that goal for me. I was recommended the course by multiple people who had said it was a great way to get involved with the Frome community, build  confidence, and figure out what you’re interested in. And I’m happy to say I wasn’t disappointed!

I wouldn’t be where I am today without Edventure as a stepping-stone. I learned a lot about myself through continuous group work and reflection on our performance. Being challenged by different points of view and experience levels allowed me to grow as a person, and I gained experience in those areas that I feared (like public speaking!)

The best part was that we were able to mould the experience to our own interests. We also had time to reflect further on our path in life, and the Edventure team provided the supportive environment I needed to explore that.

I leveraged the experience of working on our Start-Up challenge to get my first full-time job in London. Where I had the opportunity to work closely with 100s of early-stage start-ups as they went through the challenging journey of founding a company and raising funds.

The Edventure experience helped me reflect on what did and didn’t make me happy at work. I soon knew that I wanted to be closer to the exciting start-up life. I wanted to experience more of what I had at Edventure: being placed in leadership positions, trying to figure out the unknown, trying to fix something that was broken, and having a positive impact on other people.

I was lucky to stumble across a fantastic early-stage social enterprise in London called Appt Health. It was just the founder working tirelessly alone for the first year, and he had won coveted Innovate UK (the government innovation arm) funding about a week before offering me a job. I’m now in a role I love: product and general marketing, and software implementation. The company has now grown to five people, and our platform is currently used by over 50 GP practices in London!

Our aims are to use accessible digital technology to get more patients into appointments that prevent ill-health (like screenings programmes, immunisations, and QOF reviews) while also reducing health inequalities in our population. We solve the problem of uptake in preventative healthcare by automating the tricky bits for the practices at the same time as making our communications to patients more persuasive and engaging.

Appt Health is entering an exciting stage now as we prepare to scale across multiple prevention programmes and all over the UK, and the Edventure course continues to resonate with me when I’m faced with a new challenge.