Our story

Bar­rier Break­ers was ori­gin­ally foun­ded by Penelope Tobin as a char­ity in 2000, deliv­er­ing high-quality arts-based train­ing to dis­ad­vant­aged young people in the UK. The value of soft skills devel­op­ment shines through in this work, and while the art has a pos­it­ive effect, the most pro­found life-changes hap­pen because people have been given the oppor­tun­ity to break down bar­ri­ers, and develop skills such as con­fid­ence, com­mu­nic­a­tion, team­work, and cre­ativ­ity. How­ever, there was a prob­lem; the full value of this trans­form­a­tion was get­ting lost, simply because there was no effect­ive way to cap­ture, man­age and eval­u­ate soft skills. The old ways weren’t working.

And so Bar­rier Break­ers Meth­od­o­logy for soft skills devel­op­ment and eval­u­ation was born.

Or rather, BBM evolved.

Research and devel­op­ment began in 2002, a jour­ney from desk research, through pilots, case stud­ies, present­a­tions, and then the applic­a­tion through­out the 3rd sec­tor. BBM has now been used in numer­ous train­ing and devel­op­ment pro­grammes – from goal set­ting to employ­ab­il­ity, man­age­ment and lead­er­ship devel­op­ment, team­build­ing and trainer train­ing – as well as being used as an eval­u­ation method, to design change ini­ti­at­ives, and to pave the way for new pro­jects, bene­fit­ing hun­dreds of indi­vidu­als and organisations.

In 2007 Bar­rier Break­ers won a national Per­form­ance Hub prize in recog­ni­tion of this innov­at­ive 3rd sec­tor work.

Dur­ing recent years the import­ance of soft skills has grown rap­idly, and they’re now recog­nised as the cru­cial skill-set needed by every­one as we nego­ti­ate the uncer­tain ter­rain of our inter­con­nec­ted 21st cen­tury world.  It became increas­ingly clear that BBM had a wider role to play, and so we’ve expan­ded its reach out into all sec­tors. Our char­it­able work con­tin­ues, and is now sup­por­ted by everything else we do – when you work with us you help us work with others.

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