Managing director and founder of Pathways Community Interest Company Yvonne Clarke MBE will act as a guest speaker at the Women in Business in Greater Manchester webinar next week, hosted by Maximus UK.
Held on 30 September at midday, the event is targeted at aspiring women entrepreneurs and will be the third events of its kind.
Clarke is part of the Working Well Early Help team and will share her tips on how to encourage staff to maximise opportunities for business success.
She received her MBE for services to business and community in the 2020 New Year's Honours List, having earned accolades for her work supporting business innovation.
Pathways Community Interest Company was founded in 2006, it has been identified in the top 100 social enterprises in the UK and gained the Investors in People Small Business of the Year Award last year.
Aimed at developing innovative solutions to create social change, Pathways Community Interest Company supports individuals, health and social care professionals, communities, and businesses.
Looking to promote sustainable change through a range of services, Clarke explained in her recent contribution to The Parliamentary Review why she founded the organisation.
"We founded Pathways Community Interest Company to find local solutions to promote positive health, positive lifestyles, positive employment and positive families," she wrote.
"We passionately believed from the outset that whatever we did, we needed to learn from existing provision, but we needed to be disruptive, and take a community approach."
She added: "Pathways believes that in order to tackle the impact of sickness absence within the working-age population, there is a need to create a disruptive system which is ambitious for people with health conditions or disabilities, acts positively, and gets the system to see the connection between health, employment and disability.
"We believe that this is even more critical in these times of the pandemic, as this cohort of society is likely to be left behind even further. All the evidence shows that the longer you are away from work, the less likely you are to move back into work. In 2020, people who have been out of work for six months have a 50 per cent chance of going back into any work. At two years or more of unemployment, people are more likely to die or retire than move into work. Put simply, we believe that this is not acceptable."
