Samantha Crandle

I’ll be focused on growing our impact, winning new contracts, building meaningful partnerships, leading bids and tenders, and helping shape bold, values-led growth that enables more people with learning disabilities to live the life they choose. PossAbilities is an award-winning social enterprise with an outstanding culture, big ambitions, and a track record of doing things differently.

My role as senior operations manager is to lead effective delivery plans, support the teams and managers to maximise potential on a portfolio of programmes. All programmes build resilience and aspirations in people and communities. Partnership working, collaboration and CSR are huge parts of this role. Mobilisation of new contracts, delivery planning, target setting, team recruitment and roll out are key tasks i deliver. I have a wonderful role which creates opportunity for vast continued development.

I am the operations manager for Barclays LifeSkills employability programme delivered by Catch22. The aim of this programme is to recruit and support people who face barriers to work, into employment. The programme started in July 16 and I became involved in September 17. We deliver bespoke, 1-1 support for individuals who need additional support to overcome their barriers to employment. We aim to support 600 people into employment each year, most of who will sustain for a minimum of 6 months. I manage delivery in London, Liverpool & Manchester. We also deliver online workshops, signpost individuals to appropriate services when needed, access a training fund which up-skills individuals and helps them to realise their goals. This role is hugely rewarding and we are successfully meeting all targets for delivery.

As the operations manager of Catch22's NCS - National Citizen Service programme across the northwest it was my role to manage a large budget and source in kind support. Manage a team of up to 9 staff year round which then ramped up during delivery months, up to 150 sessional staff. Develop staff training packages, manage stakeholder relationships, report regularly on performance to both internally Catch22 and externally the NCS prime Ingeus. Manage Safeguarding and Health & Safety locally and ensure a high quality service was being provided on behalf of the NCS Trust.

With the support of the NSPCC Participation Through Sport CIC was born. We sought to deliver training opportunities for young people to enable them to grow, develop resilience and increase their aspirations. This model created a culture of volunteering seeing older youngsters running their own community clubs across the town for younger children to help them have a safe, fun and inclusive place to make new friends and feel part of something. The company won a contract to deliver the governments flagship youth programme NCS - National Citizen Service across Warrington. We ran a very successful pilot and saw 64 young people start and complete the programme which aims to connect young people with new social groups and empower them to bring about change in their local areas for the benefit of others. PTS was a very forward thinking organisation which challenged typical safeguarding and positive activities agendas.

My role was to help create a culture of volunteering through developing and training young people using sport and positive activities as the engagement tool. I was responsible for designing training programmes and delivering and assessing them. Also as part of my role at PTS we delivered youth led consultations with young people for organisations such as The FA and Golden Gates Housing Trust. These consultations sought to find out the views of young people and help inform change.