NAME OF ORGANISATION: Bluescreen IT
LOCATION: Devon
YEAR FOUNDED: 2004
ABOUT: Bluescreen IT is a cyber skills and security company providing a wide range of training and certification courses for vulnerable young people and adults, to develop their skills for working in the cyber industry.
INVESTMENT PURPOSE: To support Bluescreen in taking on larger contracts, building capacity, and expanding their training to reach more young people.
INVESTMENT AMOUNT: £150,000
DATE OF INVESTMENT: August 2018
SOURCE OF INVESTMENT: Health & Wellbeing Challenge Fund
IMPACT: Health, Wellbeing & Social Care; Education & Learning; Work & Employment
ABOUT: BluescreenIT is nurturing the future of the growing tech industry. It works on the belief that IT can be learnt by anyone. Its services are all about upgrading knowledge to enter the workforce, to help people succeed in their professional life. BluescreenIT places a particular focus on young people who display emotional and social difficulties such as ADHD and autism and who may find it hard to engage in mainstream education, by helping them adapt both new and self-taught IT skills into the business world.
PURPOSE OF INVESTMENT: This investment from the Health and Wellbeing Challenge Fund aimed to support Bluescreen in its next steps towards expansion, and helping place the important social mission at the forefront of the organisation. BluescreenIT’s aim is to capture people who may be dabbling in hacking and might be tempted into crime (average age of hackers is 17 years) and seek to steer them into careers in IT. They provide classroom training and work experience to gain a greater understanding of the industry, which is suffering a serious skills shortage. This is an exciting first-time investment from the H&WCF into a cyber organisation – not perhaps a business that might first be associated to health and wellbeing. However, the way BluescreenIT supports vulnerable people, clearly shows an intent to improve the health and wellbeing of peoples’ lives and as a result, has a significant positive impact on the whole of society.
Michael Dieroff, Managing Director at BluescreenIT: “Watching our young learners and apprentices turning into Information Security professionals has been a really rewarding experience for the whole team. We are making a real difference in our industry and the community, which is desperately short of these skills. We were delighted to have the support from Resonance, Tom and Leila both fantastic throughout the process. Their support has allowed us to focus more effectively on strategy and delivery – and we are incredibly excited to move things forward!”
Tom Crook, Investment Manager at Resonance: “This was a really exciting deal for me because BlusescreenIT is operating as a social enterprise without really knowing it. We were able to use this investment to help them put their social mission at the forefront of the business. We held an impact on track workshop which really helped them review the data they are already collecting (which was a vast amount) and how this could feed into an impact framework to help them make strategic decisions and communicate their social impact more clearly.”
Resonance Limited is a company registered in England and Wales no. 04418625
Resonance Impact Investment Limited, a subsidiary of Resonance Limited, is authorized and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). Firm number 588462.
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