The bottom line: The sky's the limit for young people - and the Tories agree!

It's sometimes hard to remember why we're all here. I don't mean this in an existential sense (that would be a much longer article), I mean why we're all here working in a social enterprise or charity.

We clearly don't do it for the money or for the company car. For most people like us, a sense of driving social change is pretty high on our list of motivations for working in the not-for-profit sector.

I know I'm in this game because I want to see change in the world. I have worked as part of many social movements and organisations that take quite different approaches to achieving change. Like many others working in the social sector, I have found myself questioning the impact (positive or negative) I have as an individual on the world.

The job I've got now has changed that. I work for the Learning Launchpad fund, which is a social enterprise investment fund based at the Young Foundation in east London. We support great ideas for young people to realise their potential and take their first steps into work. We do this by providing financial investment and business support. These ideas are really important at a time when we have 835,000 NEETs [Not in Employment, Education or Training] in Britain. Here's why I think we can make a real difference to this problem:

First, we emphasise financial sustainability - I'm sure the majority of Social Enterprise readers are signed up to the need to free oneself from donor dependence in order to have a greater social impact. As head of operations for an AIDS NGO, I quickly realised that we were in a far stronger position than some of the other organisations in the field because we generated our own income independent of donors.

Second, as a social investor, we aim to work collaboratively with our investees to develop their business. We aim to form partnerships with our investees from day one - embarking on a learning journey together. Similarly, running an internship scheme for Leonard Cheshire Disability, I saw the power of disabled people driving the development of policy that related directly to them.

Third, unlike other social investors, we are part of a larger organisation, the Young Foundation, which has the capacity to both provide academic insights about the social needs of young people and influence and inspire policy makers. This week, we saw Lord Freud make a commitment to replicate the work of Working Rite, a Learning Launchpad investee, at the Conservative party conference.

In many ways, the common theme behind these features is the relationship that a social organisation has with its stakeholders. Through my professional successes and failures, I have learned the importance of donor independence, user-driven change and real policy influence. I'm now happy to be working for an organisation that aims to grow social ideas sustainably so that they have the bargaining power to reach lots of users with the right services and to influence policy at the highest levels.

Find out more at www.learninglaunchpad.org and follow the Learning Launchpag blog here.