Look out for (and welcome) our new trainees!

There are some new faces headed to Steps in the coming weeks – our favourite kind, new trainees! We’re proud of this cohort for loads of reasons, and one of them is that they’ll be the first trainees to join us from the Steps Foundation.

What’s the Steps Foundation?

Let’s backtrack a bit.

Steps launched in 2016 as a social enterprise. This means we’re not a charity – we turn profits from our cafes, zero waste shops and online shops, and our trainees’ course fees – which we reinvest into our business.

But it has always been important to us to make our training accessible to young people across a broader cross section of society, including lower income families.

So now, alongside the social enterprise, we run the Steps Foundation. This allows us to collect donations which are used to sponsor trainees through our programme. Funds from the foundation are there for those who would otherwise not be able to afford to train with us. This particular group of new trainees has been funded by the Ford Fund and GlobalGiving.

A pivotal moment in the life of Steps

You don’t have to know Steps that well to know that inclusion is a word we live by. That’s why this is such a significant moment for us, and, we believe, for Thailand’s employment sector. By removing economic barriers for people with learning differences, we hope to reshape their expectations of themselves, and ultimately society’s expectations of them too.

Thanks to you – our community – our trainees always feel welcomed and included, and we know these trainees can expect the same warm welcome when you meet them in our cafes and zero waste shops. We’re looking forward to introducing you.