A social enterprise, by construction
Piozone Ltd is a certified UK social enterprise. Our purpose is written into how the company is set up, not bolted on as a values page. This is what we are here to do and how we go about it.
Piozone is dedicated to empowering communities through training, support services and the sharing of expertise, a catalyst for positive, lasting change.
Development work that survives the handover
Piozone trades as the International Pioneers Forum for Development. We are a certified member of Social Enterprise UK, which means our purpose and the way we reinvest are independently checked rather than self-declared.
We are based in London and we work wherever the need is. Our people came into this from delivery rather than consultancy, and that shapes the work. We are less interested in the report at the end than in whether the group can still run the thing in a year, once the budget has closed and the visiting team has gone home.
In practice that means three services that reinforce each other: training that builds the skill, company registration and banking support that gives an organisation the legal footing to trade and receive funds, and social development work that turns a community's own ambition into something structured enough to be fundable.
We judge a programme by what is still running a year after we leave.
How we measure our own work Anyone can fill a room. The test is whether the group can run the next session without us, with their own people and their own budget. That is what we design for, from the first meeting rather than the last.
Understand, equip, empower
Three steps, in that order, on every engagement. The third one is the one most programmes skip.
Understand
We listen first. Discovery sessions with the people who will actually be in the room, and a hard look at the constraints you are working inside: budget, timescale, staff turnover, what has already been tried.
Equip
We deliver the training, the filings or the programme design, and we hand over the materials with them. Templates, facilitation plans, checklists, whatever the work produces stays with you.
Empower
We plan the handover from the first meeting, not the last. Local people trained to run it, documentation they can follow, and a review point after we have stepped back.
What it looks like in the room
Turning global goals into local action
Seventeen goals on a slide is a poster. The session works when a group leaves with two of them turned into something they have the people and the budget to start.