From Zero Funding to Lasting Impact: How SPACE4 Helped Breakthrough Get Started

When Dee Norval founded Breakthrough, her mission was to get prison leavers into work. Breakthrough trained participants and found them roles with employers, often with apprenticeship training built in. Dee had a clear purpose and no funding. SPACE4 gave her a place to start anyway.

Dee chose to run Breakthrough as a bootstrapped business rather than a charity, which meant proving the model before anyone would back it.

A home before there was a budget

SPACE4 offered Breakthrough a base when there was no money to pay for one. As the team grew, Breakthrough’s own staff, hired through the Kickstart scheme, found the same welcome: a desk, a community, and connections to help them build their careers.

When Breakthrough was ready to test its approach, SPACE4 hosted the pilot. Every participant in that pilot, 100%, went on to secure a full-time apprenticeship.

A community, not just a workspace

Breakthrough ran monthly socials at SPACE4, building a network of people united by wanting to improve their lives. Those connections outlasted the events.

Through the space, Dee met the personal development coaches, photographers, lawyers and editors who helped turn an early idea into a credible organisation. And every week, community lunch brought everyone together. For Dee, it was “a moment of joy in what was sometimes a gruelling time.”

What Breakthrough went on to achieve

• 100% of pilot participants secured full-time apprenticeships
• Reoffending among programme participants fell from an expected 42% to 4%
• First UK organisation to get laptops into prisons
• Onboarded employers including Amazon, Google and KPMG, whose first hire came through Breakthrough
• Persuaded major corporates to remove conviction bans from their hiring, opening supply chains that account for 50,000+ UK hires a year

Breakthrough today

Breakthrough continues its work today, now led by someone with lived experience of the criminal justice system. Dee credits SPACE4 as the place where it all began.