School of Business
St Andrews Play Association
Established: 1981
Legal structure: Charity
Who we are
The St Andrews Play Association is a purpose-built youth building with an adjoining ball court, situated in a city centre park next to Leicester Royal Infirmary. They provide inclusive and meaningful play activities and opportunities for local children aged 5 to 14, after school and during holidays. It’s a busy and much appreciated service with up to 100 young people attending each night. They create targeted programs to empower young people to lead healthy and fulfilling lives.
The challenge
When St Andrew’s Play Association found out that their core funding was being cut, they had months to put together plans for a financially sustainable future. They had to make the transition from a delivery focused organisation with expertise in youth work and play theory, to an entrepreneurial organisation that could build, cost, and test the market for new business models.
What was required
SAPA needed business plans and action plans to show funders that they were exploring and developing new sustainable delivery models. They needed to balance the demands of diligent winding up with the development of entrepreneurial skills to create sustainable futures and new business models.
- Business modelling
- Possibility thinking
- Cloud based audio capture
- AI writing tools - summarising and editing
- Business planning
- Action planning
Took the organisation from a starting point of having no plans, to having developed plans and live discussions with partners and funders to deliver new services.
Growth acceleration through
Business modelling: Refocusing away from the problems they were facing to seeing new partners as customers and exploring the value they could create for them.
Business planning: Repackaging the elements of a business plan into headings that made sense and using audio capture and AI to populate the sections of the plan.
Action planning: Planning the balancing act of business as usual whilst also handling emergency planning, high levels of organisational change, stress, whilst positively developing new opportunities.
"For 40 odd years the project’s had the mindset of there's only limited things we could do, whereas from what we've just gone through, it's opened up a whole field of possibilities and it will make us think in a way that we've not thought of before and the possibilities that we develop and how would they could be further developed now... it has been a real eye opener.”
Stephen Ashley, Project Manager St Andrews Play Association
