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Liverpool's Claire Dove wins Lifetime Achievement accolade

This year’s winner of the Queen’s Lifetime Achievement Award for Enterprise Promotion is Merseyside’s Claire Dove MBE, DL, after a long career in social enterprise and a plethora of impressive achievements. Claire set up her own company, Blackburne House, in 1983 as a way to offer training and education for women and help them into non-traditional career areas such as IT. Since then the business has grown from offering 30 training places a year to over 1,000 annually, while it now employs 70 people; many of whom are former Blackburne House trainees.

Bdaily spoke to Claire about winning the Lifetime Achievement Award, and found out why, as a black woman in business, she was motivated to accomplish all that she has over her remarkable career:

“I was absolutely taken aback to be nominated and to have won. It’s very, very special, and coincides with Blackburne House’s 30th anniversary, which makes it even more special.

“It’s great for a woman, and especially a black woman in business. It’s very gratifying because you can use anything like this to be a role model and encourage other people into this area.

“My involvement in social enterprise goes back a long way along the road I travelled as a young person. Our country was very different in the late 60s, early 70s when I tried to get a job. The racism in the country was awful, and I couldn’t get a job.

“I was told in some instances that people wouldn’t work with me, and jobs magically went at 9.15 in the morning even though they’d come into the careers service at 9 o’clock. That was a sliding door moment for me.

“I thought, should I just go home and accept I can’t get a job because of the colour of my skin? Or should I go out and fight it? So I decided to fight it.”

In the early 1970s, Claire set up an employment agency in Liverpool along with the help of the Martin Luther King Foundation and the John Moores Foundation. Claire told Bdaily how this agency was based on skills, rather than skin colour, and applicants were sent to job interviews because they were the best candidate for the position.

This is an ethos that Claire still carries with her today, which she explained as we went on talk about the topical issue of the number of female representatives of UK FTSE boards:

“We know that we need women on boards. Why would you choose your talent base from only half of the population? Why wouldn’t you, as a business, be looking to pull from 100%, to get the very best candidate?

“There’s lots of able, young women that should be able to reach these positions. We’re still not used to propelling the best people into these positions, so if we don’t have quotas we’ve got to do something and be really serious about it.

“This isn’t about doing women favours. It’s about getting the best talent on the boards, and drawing from a larger pool rather than a smaller pool, which they do at this time.”

Blackburne House has helped thousands of women since it was established 30 years ago, and Claire explained why there is still work to be done to help women achieve as highly as they can in their careers:

“In the country at the moment we’re looking at austerity cuts and the downturn. Women have suffered a lot at this moment, but for many years women were under-employed and had low skills as well as low pay.

“Really our aim has been to demonstrate that women can get into high-level careers and also start their own businesses. We want to show that there is that choice there for women, and that has been our aim.

“There are still major issues with young women at the moment because as we know, we’ve got lots of unemployment amongst our youth.

“For some young women they see things like X Factor or other young women marrying footballers, as a way out. And what we’re strongly proclaiming is that you too can have a career and do well wherever you are, and that’s something we can support you with.”

Claire is also the national chair of Social Enterprise UK, and works within the sector across the country. She spoke further about the strengths of social enterprise in the UK, as well as improvements that need to be made:

“Within social enterprise in the UK there is still a lot to do. I think what people are looking for now is ethical business.

“They’re not just looking to buy, they’re looking for something extra. Social enterprise is really coming into its own. People are saying more and more if they’re going to buy something they want it to be ethical.

“We’ve had some fabulous changes such as the Public Value Act which came into force is changing how people procure and how public services are procured in the future.

“We have some absolutely 1st class businesses in the UK that are social enterprises. They are no different from any other business, the only difference is that we don’t have shareholder value. The value of what we do is ploughed back into communities.”

Claire concluded by telling Bdaily about what is next for herself and for Blackburne House:

“Blackburne House is still developing, we are still doing some great work. For me personally I do a lot of other things, especially with Social Enterprise UK, to grow the social economy and to inspire people into the sector by showing them this is a great career choice.

“There’s a lot on for me. Retirement’s not too far away but I don’t think I’ll ever retire! There’s still so much to do, and still so much I want to do.

“As excited and buoyed up as I was when I started out in the early 70s, there’s still lots of things I want to achieve. I want to break the barriers and go down other paths with some of those fabulous people that I work with.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Miranda Dobson .