Our Charity
SAMEE is a Dorset based charity established in 2016 by Sam Everard. We teach self-employment skills to enable disabled people to gain further independence through meaningful employment creating their own income.
As a charity, we are striving to break down the barriers to work and help narrow the disability employment gap through supporting people with disabilities, learning difficulties and/or autism to explore non-traditional forms of employment that will effectively fit around their learning needs.
We have strategic partners both in employment and education sectors to ensure provision of the highest quality advice, guidance and information. We have also been Disability Confident Leaders since 2018.
Our guidance includes a mix of peer mentoring and personal guidance with a qualified and experienced advisor to teach self-employment skills to people with disabilities. Our aim is to best prepare our customers for a successful self-employment start-up with additional specialist in-trade support.
“Our mission is to make self-employment a more accessible option and teach essential life skills to enable people within the disabled community to gain further independence and to assist them in achieving their goals through enabling a successful self-employment start-up
Our Core Values
We are Daring…When a disabled person wants to explore self-employment, our mentors have the confidence to encourage our participants to pursue their aspirations and dreams.
We are Honest… When exploring self-employment with our participants, we have the courage to discuss potential challenges openly with them to ensure that they are able to make an independent and informed decision.
We are Always Listening… We listen to our participants to ensure that we deliver a truly bespoke package of co-created support and resources which meets their individual, communication and holistic needs.
We provide a variety of specialist services for those ages 14 and over which includes;
How do we support people?
At SAMEE, we aim to support our beneficiaries in more ways than 1. We do this by offering different forms of tailored support, in different areas. For example, employment and self-employment mentoring, confidence building, and guidance. We are also a partner with The Smallwood Trust so we are able to give out Smallwood grants for those in need of household items and in-trade support for those already self-employed.
The SAMEE charities main channel of support is through DEBSS, which stands for Disabled Entrepreneur Business Start-up Service and is our adult provision. To deliver this support we have a team of 9 experienced business mentors each supporting their own online self-employment client base.
Another form of self-employment support that SAMEE deliver is through our SISE (Steps into Self-employment) programme. This course was co-designed over 5-years with the disabled community to ensure it’s flexible and aids success. The course is aimed at disabled aspiring self-employed individuals, preferably who have an EHCP and are between the ages of 18 and 30.
We have also recently launched the UKs first Supported Self-Employment Internship which is aimed at 16-25 year olds with an EHCP.
Another branch of our support includes a team of business advisors who work with those who are unemployed and looking at gaining successful employment and/or self-employment.
Our outreach team work closely with the Smallwood trust and are based mainly in Dorset. We do have a few advisors up and down the country who can also offer this support! They deliver workshops, 1-to-1 support and attend various community events. The focus for this support is on confidence building, life skills, financial support through the purchase of household items, and relevant signposting where needed.
