HelpBnk

“Growing up in Jamaica, I used to stand beside my mum at her market stall and watch her blend spices. She taught me that flavour could transform even the simplest meal, and I never forgot that. When I moved to the UK, I kept looking for that food in shops and finding it pushed to the back of the world food aisle, like it was something foreign and complicated rather than something people had been cooking their whole lives. The products that did exist often tasted like a version of Caribbean food, not the real thing. I was building the business, doing festivals, trying to get it off the ground, when another trader's stall collapsed and landed on my ankle. I was confined to home for almost two years. There were days when I was genuinely afraid I might never walk properly again, and somewhere in the middle of all that fear I had to accept that the version of the business I'd been building wasn't going to survive it. So I went back to the drawing board and started again from complete stillness. Nimi Nosh is now in over 400 Tesco stores. We won Best Caribbean Sauce this year. I gave up my job, put in everything I had with no guaranteed return, and rebuilt after the kind of setback that makes you question whether any of it was worth it. I still think about my mum at that market stall every time I'm working on a blend. She never made it feel complicated." @niminosh

“In 2003, my mum took her own life. We were estranged at the time, as she was from my two sisters, and despite repeated attempts to make peace over the years, we never managed to repair it. I carried a great deal of guilt around that, and I still do. I became very unwell afterward and couldn't work for several months. When I went back to my career with Lancashire Police, I was functioning, but I wasn't fulfilled. Grief had completely consumed me. For years, alongside the job, I'd been making my own marinade and cooking for colleagues. Something small and joyful that had quietly grown into something people genuinely loved. Then I appeared on Britain's Best Dish and was crowned Regional Finalist for the North West, and for the first time since losing my mum, I felt something like lightness. So I left a secure career with no experience in running a food business, opened a sandwich shop, built an outside catering business, and eventually launched my marinade as a retail product. I travelled from Preston to London to pitch it, made a mess of it, and pitched again, and then again, because I wanted to get it right. Since February 2022 I've sold over 21,000 pouches. Ten food awards. A product that started in my home kitchen. I used to cook to bring people a bit of joy. I think that's still what I'm doing." @cravemarinades

“I was working for a Local Authority, commissioning services, and I kept watching the same thing happen. A family would need support, funding would be allocated, and then a huge chunk of it would disappear into agency fees before it ever reached the professional actually doing the work. Then I read a Coroner's report. It stated that every completed suicide they had reviewed involved a child or young person whose mental health needs had not been met in a timely way. Every single one. I sat with that for a long time. I have two children of my own. I was already seeing the rise in poor mental health and SEND needs up close, and I knew what the delays looked like on the ground. That report just made it impossible to look away. So I built TACaccess, a platform that connects commissioners, parents, and adults directly with therapists and specialists, without the inflated costs in between. We launched in March 2024 and since then we've helped someone every 48 hours, over 1,200 therapy sessions delivered, more than 1,150 providers registered. People in my life have suffered. Some of them didn't make it, because the help didn't come in time. I think about them when I'm running on no sleep, which is most days. I keep going because their lives were not wasted if something changes because of them." @simmonds.ruth

“In my first year of uni I was so lost and depressed that my nervous system shut down. I got impetigo, marks all over my face. That was the moment I started 'If Only They Knew,' just a free Instagram page, no real plan, no real purpose. I kept putting content out like that for seven years. Then within a few months, my uncle died, my cousin was stabbed and killed, someone tried to kill me, and my dad died in a car crash a week later. I lost all of my money multiple times. Got into debt. Lost friends. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I finally stopped treating what I'd built like a hobby. I trained in somatics, hypnotherapy, breathwork, and started running proper group sessions I call Mindset Workouts. Within a year I'd worked with over a hundred people directly, and my methods were being used by high-performers from Team GB and Anthony Joshua's charity. I wouldn't change any of it, because it got me here. But I think about my dad a lot. He didn't get to see what the pain made possible." @tedlawlor

“My daughter begged me to call the police on her dad one day, because she was so scared. I will never forget that. That was the moment I knew I had no choice but to find a way out. My mum had died of cancer when I was 20, and I wasn't close to anyone else in my family. So when I finally left, there was no village waiting for me. Just me, my daughter, and the reality of trying to survive while still healing from everything we'd been through. A 9-to-5 wasn't realistic. I didn't have the childcare, and I wasn't in a place where I could commit to something rigid while still trying to find my feet. I'd been building a photography career I loved, but the hours were unpredictable and the income wasn't stable enough to secure our future. I tried so many other things online, and everything felt isolating and inconsistent. I built this business in the small moments between motherhood, during nap times, late evenings, piece by piece. It gave me an income, and it gave me a community of women cheering me on, which I hadn't had in a very long time. I've now mentored over 65 women taking their first steps toward financial independence. And I keep thinking about all the women still in that place I was in, where leaving feels impossible because there's no financial way forward. I want to be the thing that didn't exist for me. I rebuilt alone. I don't want other women to have to." @theasmumclub

“Growing up on a council estate in Prestwick, my mum would pretend to be home so we could claim Universal Credit. My dad had served in the Falklands, guarded Buckingham Palace, and was now unemployed and addicted. That was the map I was handed. The thing that was missing wasn't just money, it was visibility. I had no one to show me that someone from my background could build a different life, until Sir Tom Hunter came to speak at my school and something cracked open a little. I worked eight years to qualify at KPMG. Eight years to earn the thing my whole childhood told me I'd never have, which was security. Then I quit, straight after qualifying, to go all in on a podcast I'd started from my council estate bedroom with basic equipment and no connections. From that kind of household, that's genuinely nuts. The podcast was already running when my mum died. I was 21 and she was in her late fifties, a heart attack, and I hadn't seen it coming. I kept going because stopping felt like the wrong answer to that kind of loss. 150 episodes later, 4 million views, guests from Seth Godin to Sir Tom Hunter himself, the same man who first broke the ceiling for me. I built what I needed when I was the kid with no map. I just want it to reach more people like me." @davidmcintoshjr

“In my family, money was never discussed calmly. It was whispered. It was stress. It was survival mode. I watched my parents work incredibly hard and still feel financially insecure. I learned early that intelligence and effort don't automatically equal wealth. Access and knowledge matter. After fifteen years in finance, I kept seeing the same thing. Highly capable women, earning well, leading teams, running households, going through divorce, losing partners, starting again. And when it came to their own money, many felt small. They avoided looking at their bank accounts. They delayed decisions because they were afraid of getting it wrong. Then I had to make a major financial decision of my own, and even with all that experience behind me, it still felt heavy. That was confronting. If I could feel that weight, what does it feel like for women who were never taught any of this? I still carry the fear of losing it all. That scarcity mindset from childhood, it stays with you. But I remember the women who message me saying 'I finally understand my money.' And I think about growing up in a house where no one ever said that out loud." @ailamoney

"On 24 February 2022, I packed one small backpack. Laptop, medication, documents, and nothing else. I left Ukraine when the rockets started and arrived in the UK without a home, without a network, without any idea what came next. The only thing I knew was that I wasn't the only one. There were hundreds of women like me, Ukrainian professionals in tech, trying to rebuild from zero in a country that didn't know their names yet. So I started bringing them together. No budget, no funding, never a ticket price on a single event. Just me finding opportunities and passing them on. That was 2022. Wtech now has 18,000 members, and more than 10,000 women have come through the programmes I've built, finding jobs, funding, and people who actually understand what starting over feels like. I still do all of it for free. Some people ask me why I don't charge, and I never quite know how to answer that. I just remember what it felt like to land somewhere new with one bag and no one who knew you existed. I want to reach a million women eventually. But mostly I think about the one who just arrived somewhere unfamiliar, opened her laptop, and doesn't know where to start." @julysaldaeva

"I was pregnant, exhausted, and sat in a smoky Moroccan casino at 4am when I beat 200 men to win my first international poker tournament. That was 2016. By my 30s I'd lost my brother Adam, my best friend, my dad, and my mum - most of them in quick succession, some while I was still in banking, passing out on the trading floor from exhaustion. Grief does something to your risk tolerance. I stopped wanting to make rich people richer and started wanting to make something that was mine. I started hosting home poker games and got frustrated that they were all men, so I just taught my female friends to play. Within weeks I was watching them walk into client meetings differently - closing deals, asking for promotions, holding their ground. I'd used poker strategy to negotiate £1 million in VC funding for my last business and never really thought about why it worked. Watching them, I finally understood. It's not bluff. It's deep listening. Reading the room. Knowing when to hold. I launched Aces High in January 2025 - corporate events, zero gambling, pure strategy - and we hit £130k in our first year, 600 people across 29 events. The FT covered us. CBS broadcast to 15 million viewers. Some nights I'm setting up tables as my son walks in from school and packing down as he goes to bed, and I don't get to ask how his day was. But I'm teaching him poker. And I think he already knows how to read a room." Instagram - @aceshighlondon

"I called a company to help us develop the recipes commercially and the first thing they said was they don't work with startups. I asked for five minutes. Just five minutes to explain what we were trying to do. They said yes, the managing director got on a follow-up call, and somehow we convinced them. That felt like the moment everything was about to change. We put in everything we had, borrowed more, remortgaged the house - then interest rates jumped and our monthly payments went up overnight. We're two teachers in Jersey with two boys under five, still going to work every day, trying to run a business from the edges of our lives. The consultants we hired to reach supermarket buyers kept promising doors they couldn't open. Each one cost us money we didn't have. We have three varieties of savoury muffins - hidden veg, high protein, no artificial anything, frozen so they last - and they work. The nursery staff used to stop us at pickup to ask what we were sending in. Other parents wanted to know. The product isn't the problem. We just can't get anyone to look at it. We started this because our son needed a better lunch and we couldn't find one on a shelf anywhere. That's still true.” @bealunchboxlegend

A 16 year old who published 14 books! helpbnk.com/timeline/73e0e…

What a great project from Estrella🩵 helpbnk.com/timeline/f8219…

She never gave up: helpbnk.com/timeline/77f05…

What a story: helpbnk.com/timeline/7ac23…

Our latest post about Blake: instagram.com/p/DTuaQ9qjew4/… Can you help him find a cofounder?

What a story: instagram.com/p/DThpjzzDT8t/…

Our latest post about Antoine: instagram.com/p/DTe-2wGjSXh/…

See our latest post on Ilya here: instagram.com/p/DTcq2Aljfna/… Can you help him? 💪

If you can help Reggie, comment below!

Our latest post about Reggie: instagram.com/p/DTZzk_bDbY8/…