At Forces Family Finance we wanted to feature all the winners of the 2020 Milspo Awards and this year’s Advocate Award Winner is Sarah Walker from Supporting the Unsung Hero!

About Supporting the Unsung Hero

‘Supporting the Unsung Hero’ (SUH) is an award winning, business start-up programme delivered by the Black Country Chamber of Commerce. Since 2013, SUH has been helping members of the Armed Forces community turn bright ideas into successful businesses.

As one of the original successful bids to the £35million LIBOR fund in 2013, the programme has been in high demand from spouses and adult dependants’ of serving Armed Forces personnel, Veteran’s and Reservist’s to help them realise their ambition to start-up and develop a business.

Now in its seventh year and sponsored by HSBC the training course and mentoring programme continues to grow in popularity and has already been attended by more than 1000 delegates at MOD bases in the UK and overseas. 

Over the years ‘Supporting the Unsung Hero’ (SUH) has been fine tuned to become the leading, FREE business training programme, designed specifically to meet the needs of Armed Forces families and has become widely acknowledged for its delivery of first-class coaching, setting the benchmark for business training provision for the service community.

‘Supporting the Unsung Hero’ is recognised as the springboard to entrepreneurship in the military community and has created opportunities for wider engagement with the MOD contributing to several research consultations relating to spousal education and employment. The SUH project manager sits on the MOD’s partner employment policy stakeholder group and chairs the partner employment working sub-group consisting of service family federations, service charities and affiliated organisations.

The programme has also enabled a new community of military entrepreneurs to network, support each other and in some cases, this has led to new business collaboration and skills sharing.  In 2018 they made 20% of cohort places available to veterans and reservist, this has proved to extremely popular and more places are required however, spouses remain priority.

Supporting The Unsung Hero Now

“Our team is dedicated to delivering tailored, programmes to families posted to countries across Europe (European Joint Support Unit EJSU) including British Forces Germany, Belgium, Gibraltar, Cyprus and Italy.
We have been delivering annually in Cyprus since 2013. Our instructors have more than eight years’ experience of helping delegates trade within the SBA and Cyprus overcoming the red tape involved. 

In 2020 we launched our new online cohorts, which have been received very across the community. The online programme will be extended further into 2021, with a bespoke website to support delegates further.

2021 will see the launch of the NEW online European course, covering all the legalities of trading on EJSU base and with further support from the European Chamber of Commerce Network we can support delegates through the challenges posed by Brexit.”

 Links

If you want to learn more about Sarah and what she does, you can check out her Facebook and Instagram pages.