The Globetown Learning Community is a small education charity based in Tower Hamlets in East London. Our aim is to improve the lives of disadvantaged young people working in partnership with a local secondary school and families in the community.

From 2000 the project was run as a government-funded Education Action Zone but we knew that after a few years funding would end. We needed to find a way of sustaining our project, so in 2006 we decided to become a charity.

Registering as a charity was the easy part. We didn’t have the business knowledge we needed to set up and run the organisation. The charity sector is very different to education and there are different rules around organisational structure and accounting. We needed to know how we could attract funding and support to keep the project going.

I went to the Tower Hamlets Education Business Partnership and asked if they could help me find somebody who could teach me about the business side of setting up a charity. They suggested Pilotlight, a charity that matches business volunteers with small charities to provide executive coaching and mentoring support.

Pilotlight interviewed me first - they wanted to make sure that we would be able to succeed as a charity before they agreed to work with us. We had more than 1,000 people involved but at the time we didn’t have a secure foundation to run as a standalone charity. I told them what we were trying to do, and they agreed to help.

For 14 months we worked with a team of four business professionals who ran coaching sessions with us once a month. The first step was to write a business plan. I had no idea what to do, but they helped me to understand what we needed to do to survive and attract funding. It was really hard work - they didn’t do everything for me, but kept asking me questions and forced me to work it out for myself.

After a while we realised that we needed new trustees. Originally they were all headteachers who had been involved in the Education Action Zone but we needed to find trustees who would represent the wider local community and set the direction of the charity.

We also needed lots of help with PR. We were so behind at the start that we couldn’t even sum up what we did in one sentence. Now we have a strapline - “To improve young people’s life chances through education,” - and a much clearer sense of what we want to achieve.

Without support from Pilotlight we wouldn’t be here now. It was a massive learning curve for us all, but they gave us the foundation we needed. I was nervous about losing their support but they allowed me to choose one thing that they would keep supporting us on and I chose evaluating impact. We knew what we were supposed to be doing but we needed to measure how well it was being done.

When we apply for funding we know how to articulate who we help and why. In the charity sector it is easy only to think about immediate funding but the problems we are dealing with are entrenched - our mentors helped us to identify longer-term projects and come up with a plan to ensure we will still be here in years to come.

- Jackie Barnes is the chief executive of the Globetown Learning Community, www.glcuk.org and www.pilotlight.org.uk

Times Recommends

• Lies and cover-up at MG Rover exposed by report
• High oil prices push manufacturing costs up
• Primark founder steps down as chief executive