The Big Red Kick: Voices

The Big Red Kick is an incredible growing social enterprise that supports women who face intersectional marginalisation working at a grassroots level. We support women to fulfil their aspirations in the community and be recognised for their labour.

As a collective of women supporting each other, we provide peer support, training and one-to-one coaching to women. We do this so they can build the skills and confidence needed to challenge systemic barriers to personal and community development. 

The Big Red Kick supports women with lived experience to deliver in their community.

As women with lived experience of marginalisation, many of us have had to rely on gig economy or portfolio work to make up our income. It is no shock that jobs don’t pay adequately; the London dataset estimates that in Greenwich, where we are based, 17-20% of the workforce is in the public sector.

We know that jobs, like youth work or other public sector roles, which once offered permanent contracts, council pensions, and funding for career training and development, have been outsourced to the lowest bidder. Contractors within larger organisations look to us—women with lived experience, in micro-organisations—to deliver the work. The reality now is we are pushed into volunteering, financial insecurity and the constant threat of competitive grants and tendering.

Like Lucy, More2Mind, who found work simply drying up from the Childrens Hubs and Sure Start centres she used to work with, Lucy ended up on benefits. The Big Red Kick supported Lucy with the knowledge she needed to apply for grants, start a social enterprise and to keep working at the job she loves.

Or Ester, The Javan Coker Foundation, working in a community where English is often the second or third language and providing a range of services to young people and their families. Whenever there was a local knife crime incident, the number of young people coming to the after school club noticeably rose. The Big Red Kick provided the tools to evaluate the impact of her work with those kids and their families, but more importantly the support to value her own time and the confidence to push back when her work was underfunded.

We work with women furthest away from power—those who face marginalisation because they are carers, because English is not their first language, or because they may have missed out on passing GCSE maths at 16 and have never had the chance to reach their potential. We support these women to represent themselves, secure fair wages, and question the ethics of encouraging women into low-paid or unpaid labour, or to move out poverty through the confidence to create social enterprise and independence.