Emma Stewart: Work it out
Noella Mingo meets Emma Stewart, who is helping London mums combine the school gates with salaries
Above: Women Like Us co-founder Emma Stewart of Crystal Palace
She may hail from the Cotswolds, but Emma Stewart, co-founder of the award-winning social enterprise Women Like Us, has taken south London to her heart. Emma came to study at Surrey University in Roehampton and never left. Since her student days she has lived in Putney, Wandsworth and Brixton, but now calls Crystal Palace home. Emma says, “I like south London because it has a deep sense of community that you just don’t find anywhere else’.
However, Emma didn’t fully appreciate life in Crystal Palace until she became a mother. Before then, she worked in town and socialised in town and freely admits that all she knew of the area was “a few cafes that did a good Sunday breakfast”. That all changed once she began hitting the streets with George, five, and Rose, two; suddenly the delights of SE19 were opened up to her. “Crystal Palace is a great place to bring up kids and I really appreciate the fact that we have a horizon. In one direction there is the city in all its glory and in the other, the beautiful Kent countryside.”
But for Emma there is so much more to her part of south London than great parks and child-friendly cafes. She finds plenty of scope for grown up pursuits too. “Around here you can walk down a number of high streets full of good, local, independent businesses. Crystal Palace has wonderful vintage clothing markets, a brilliant bookshop, one-off boutiques and fantastic restaurants.” Lordship Lane in East Dulwich is another of Emma’s high street hot spots where she is particularly fond of William Rose, the hugely popular organic butcher. Emma’s appreciation of where she lives helped fuel her desire to bring Women Like Us, south of the river. “I wanted to do something for my neighbourhood because providing local work for local people will benefit every aspect of the area.”
Although Emma’s background is in television where she worked as a production manager, she knew that this wouldn’t be the right career once she had kids. So Emma left the long-hours and high stress of TV to work for a mental health charity, where she met Karen Mattison, her Women Like Us co-founder. Eventually, the two women set up a consultancy helping voluntary and public sector organisations become more socially aware. It was here that they first identified the enormous problem that employers had finding experienced part-time staff.
As mothers, both Emma and Karen found they were regularly meeting other women who wanted to work, but lacked the confidence and expertise to find flexible jobs that fitted around their children. The two friends had a eureka moment and realised that the 500,000 talented women with children who wanted to work, could easily fill the skills shortage many employers were facing. Thus, in 2004, Women Like Us was born as a social enterprise that supports women in finding flexible jobs and helps employers source good part-time staff. Following its success north of the river, the enterprise was launched in south London in November 2007.
The organisation has an innovative approach, going to the place women with children are most likely to talk about returning to work: the school gates. I asked Emma they accomplish this. “We partner with schools by sending information home to mothers in their children’s book-bags, and by having a representative on site to provide support and advice to women interested in our services”. The Women Like Us ‘schools gates’ network has reached over 30,000 women to date. Now, they are operating in Southwark, Lambeth, Lewisham and Croydon and, even if you don’t have kids or your school isn’t signed up yet, anyone can register online.
While there are plenty of agencies and online job boards that offer part-time work and a range of businesses that provide career coaching, Emma believes that Women Like Us offers a truly unique service, “No other organisation combines all these elements. We provide face-to-face support with training and coaching in everything from CV writing, interview techniques and networking skills as well as full recruitment services. We can reach south London’s women, help them prepare to get back into work, and then help them find it.”
Anna is a Women Like Us south London success story. "As I hadn't worked for a while I was really lacking in confidence,” she recalls,”but the workshops were just what I needed. There were so many people from all different walks of life who shared the same feelings of inadequacy as me, that I was reassured to know I was not alone."
Emma is herself a shining example of successful flexible working; she runs a business and still manages to spend quality time with her family. I met up with Emma at 10am on one of her ‘days off’; she’d already had a meeting with George’s head-teacher and after our chat was dashing off to do the shopping before picking up Rose from playgroup. Superwoman? Maybe, but for Emma and many others like her, flexible working works.
www.womenlikeus.org.uk