We started because the gap was obvious and nobody was filling it

Our founder Omar Mentesh left school at 13 and what followed was time in the criminal justice system and then the long, unglamorous work of getting back. He gained a degree completed as an adult, years spent supporting other people leaving prison and a growing certainty that the provision on offer was aimed at the wrong problem. The problem was not that people lacked ambition. It was that nobody showed them where the door was, or what was behind it. Anabranch Plus started as Omar's answer to that. It might have stayed an idea, but what turned it into a company was a business mentor named Les Gill met Omar as a mentor whilst he was working on his business plan and supported him for over 2 years and eventually became a co-founder. That is not incidental to how the company works, it is the design. Lived experience without business discipline produces organisations that do-good work and run out of money. Business discipline without lived experience produces provision that looks credible on paper and does not land in the room. Anabranch Plus was built on the assumption that you need both, in the same organisation and complimenting each others skills. It is also why we take mentoring seriously enough to hold a partnership with the Association of Business Mentors and why our programmes pair lived experience facilitators with trained mentors rather than choosing between them. We are not recommending a model we read about, we are the outcome of it.

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