• What does it do? Rising Stars Solutions CIC provides professional and efficient construction, clearance and gardening services in the Midlands.  
• Turnover: £400k with 99% of this coming from tradable income.  
• Income from trading uplift post Match Trading – 30%  
• SSE programme: Lloyds Bank Social Entrepreneurs Scale Up 2021 in the Midlands

La’Toyah set up Rising Stars in 2013 to provide employment and training to disadvantaged groups. What started as a cleaning company quickly developed when gaps in the market showed opportunities arise in the same properties to provide garden services and construction work. The organisation works with housing associations and facilities management companies that look after the stock of housing owned by associations and local authorities.

La’Toyah set up the organisation to help ex-offenders get back into employment after going through some difficulties herself. The main focus was to provide employment for herself and ex-offenders, but this soon developed into providing work experience, training and employment to wider disadvantaged groups of people wanting to enter the labour market.

How did Match Trading help?

70% of Rising Stars work is now house clearances. As a result of this work a lot of furniture is acquired so La’Toyah used the Match Trading grant from the Lloyds Programme to open a shop to sell the furniture recouped from house clearances.

“When the Match Trading funding came about and I saw that there was an opportunity, it was like a win win situation. There is no funding like that around. There’s plenty of funding for sitting down with people or helping people with job searches but I want to give people real life experiences. People want real opportunities to change and that’s where the funding came in so perfectly to start the shop.” Says La’Toyah.

The shop is not only providing employment it’s also providing low-cost goods to people who need it most. “Everything in our shop is £70 and under so you can come in, you can get a fridge freezer, you can get a bed, you can get a sofa and we’ve done that on purpose because we feel that the people that use second-hand shops 90% of the time are doing it because they don’t have a lot of  disposable income.”

The Rising Stars shop is not all about the money, it’s about providing employment opportunities, volunteering and it’s about giving back to the community by making sure they stay cost-effective. “It’s for those who need it most and the Match Trade funding was a big help to kick start it and for me to know that somebody believed in the idea.” Says La’Toyah.

La’Toyah’s vision was given the backing it needed to succeed: “I knew we could make a profit out of this whilst also keeping people off benefits and giving them employment. We’re also saving things from going to landfill. Prior to the shop opening everything would go to our local tip and into landfill and we were paying astronomical prices to do it. There’s now also a huge environmental and social value benefit to the shop.”

The benefits that Match Trading brought to La’Toyah’s organisation helped her establish Rising Stars as a business, and herself as a social entrepreneur.

“Social enterprises are supposed to make money. They’re supposed to be self-sustainable, and funding should just be an addition to this. With this funding, it allowed us to build on our existing business in a different way because there’s not much of this type of funding around.”

La’Toyah believes that Match Trading made Rising Stars into what it is… a business that serves her community.