Sponsorship for our first Social Innovation Lab is open - here's how to get involved
Last week we introduced Innovation Labs - a new format from Fresh Meet CIC that puts real organisational challenges in front of sharp young people and sees what happens. No theory, no simulations, just actual problems handed to people who haven't been told yet what's too difficult, too expensive, or too out there.
The first one is happening Monday 6 July 2026. Here's where things stand.
The day itself
On Monday 6 July, Fresh Meet CIC runs its first Innovation Lab - the Social Innovation Lab - at Discovery by Scrannery, Pennine Five, Sheffield, from 9am to 3pm.
We're bringing together a cohort of sharp 13–25 year-olds - via schools, academies, colleges and our own network - and dropping them into a room with local industry experts to solve real, live problems for the day.
This inaugural Lab is themed around the social sector: challenges submitted by charities, social enterprises and other third sector organisations. As an industry, we're well aware of the funding pressure, apathy and rising demand that the third sector is up against - and the young people we work with genuinely care about solving exactly that kind of problem.
It's the first of many Labs. We're starting here because it's where we're most embedded, and where fresh thinking can have the most immediate impact.
It's not just "help us get more donors"
When charities and social enterprises hear "send us a Challenge Brief," the instinct is often to reach for a marketing problem - get more donors, raise more money, grow the mailing list. That's a perfectly valid challenge, and we'd welcome it.
But it's rarely the highest-value one. When Bravand rebuilt the website for baby bank charity Little Village, the brief wasn't "help us raise more money" - it was understanding what every different visitor to the site actually needed, from financial donors and corporates through to the health visitors making referrals and the families being supported. Our founder Jilly Cross has made the same point before: most charities judge a new website on funds raised alone, when the time saved by making things simpler for the people using it affects an organisation's overall effectiveness just as much as fundraising does.
That's the kind of thinking we want in the room on 6 July. A Challenge Brief might be about donor experience - but it might just as easily be about volunteer onboarding, service design, an internal process that's eating up staff time, or three different audiences all fighting over the same form for different reasons. We'll be writing more about what makes a strong Challenge Brief shortly. For now, the short version: if it's a real problem your organisation is facing, it counts.
What we need now: organisations behind it
Running a Lab properly means more than booking a room and a cohort. It means challenge briefs worth solving, a day that runs smoothly, and a story worth telling afterwards. That's where sponsorship comes in - and we've kept it simple, with three ways in.
Partner Sponsor - £1,500 + VAT (3 places available)
This is top-tier backing for the whole event. Partner sponsors get prominent brand presence across all our communications before, during and after the Lab, a 2-minute slot to introduce their business to the full cohort, and their own live challenge brief for a team to work on through the day. You'll have a seat on the pitch judging panel, one attendee place at the Lab itself, and a write-up of your team's pitch afterwards.
We'll also be posting across Fresh Meet, Bravand, Pennine Five and our own personal LinkedIn profiles - a combined reach of more than 24,000 followers.
If you want your name properly associated with backing young talent in South Yorkshire - not just adjacent to it - this is the tier.
Media Sponsor - £500 + VAT (1 opportunity)
Every Lab needs telling well afterwards, and that takes a decent photographer and someone capturing video on the day. The Media Sponsor backs that work directly: watermark branding on all the edited photography, a full digital photo pack to keep and reuse, a credit on the video showcase, and promo presence at the event itself.
Food & Drink Sponsor - £500 + VAT (1 opportunity)
Your brand, next to the bread cakes. A simple, visible way to support the day - your name is where the cohort actually gathers, at every break and at lunch.
Can't stretch to a paid tier?
We've got room for a small number of no-cost Friend of the Lab supporters - logo on the day, named in our channels, nothing more required. If that's a better fit for your organisation, just ask.
What sponsors get back
Every sponsor - paid or Friend of the Lab - gets an impact summary after the Lab: how many young people were involved, which organisations took part, and what came out of the day's challenges. Something you can drop straight into your own reporting, rather than a vague thank-you.
Confirm by Friday 26 June 2026
We need a short lead-in to get sponsor branding into the challenge briefs, comms and on-the-day materials properly, so we're asking organisations to confirm by Friday 26 June. If none of the tiers above quite fit your organisation, we're also open to discussing something bespoke - get in touch and we'll talk it through.
Got a Challenge Brief, or want to sponsor?
Drop the Ross a line:
We're genuinely excited about this one. If you back young people, fund social causes, or just want to see what a room full of switched-on 13–25 year-olds can do with a real problem in a single day - this is your chance to be in the room.
About Fresh Meet CIC
Fresh Meet CIC is a social enterprise delivering paid digital internships, Careers in Digital workshops and Innovation Labs for young people aged 16–25 across South Yorkshire. Internships are 100-hour placements paid at Real Living Wage on live commercial projects, funded through Bravand's project work and events like this one.
About Bravand
Bravand is an independent, female-founded digital studio designing and building complex platforms, products and services for organisations that need things to work. Based in Sheffield and London, Bravand co-founded Fresh Meet CIC, channelling commercial project work into paid digital internships for young people across South Yorkshire.
