UpRising was founded in 2008 to work with talented young people from diverse backgrounds and support them with the tools, networks and confidence to progress in their chosen fields. 2018 marks the tenth anniversary of UpRising’s very first programmes in East London.

We were created to tackle the lack of representation at the highest leadership levels of society.

Whilst successive governments have put social mobility high on the public policy agenda and progress in certain areas has been made, a Social Mobility Commission study in 2016 found that people born in the 1980s are the first post-war cohort not to start their working years with higher incomes than their immediate predecessors.

Only 6% of MPs are BAME and only 29% are women. This lack of diversity is reflected in the not-for-profit sector, where only 6% of senior management team members and 8% of trustees in Britain’s 50 largest charities are BAME.

UpRising was set up to address this power imbalance.

Ten years later we are operating leadership and employability programmes in Manchester, Cardiff, Birmingham, London, Luton, and Bedford, with hundreds of young people benefiting from our programmes each year.

We are tremendously proud of everything that UpRising has achieved so far, and of the talent and drive of young people on our programmes, who go on to become leaders in fields such as law, business and social enterprise, politics and the media.

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2nd May 2018