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About Us

Turtle Dove Cambridge was created to fill a gap in youth support work.

With one very specific aim, Kate Nation founded Turtle Dove to improve the future of young women who are or are at risk of becoming unemployed through not having the confidence or experience to seek employment.

This mission was driven by Kate’s first-hand experience in the youth sector where she saw the effects of a system where there are twice as many young women not currently searching for jobs compared to their male peers.

She also wanted to create a safe, female-only space that offers these young women an opportunity to flourish away from the pressure of their male contemporaries, around whom research shows they often don’t perform to the best of their abilities.

Having grown organically over the past few years, Kate has ambitious plans to drive this project forward – reaching more young women than before, offering them the opportunity to strengthen their self-confidence and work towards building successful futures.

By providing them with opportunities in hospitality, working as part of a team and with a defined structure, these young women can gain invaluable life experience.

Our team of young women help assist in small-scale events, working on and off site to help ensure the event runs smoothly and seamlessly. We combine our service by working in partnership with various local caterers, restaurants, other social enterprises and community groups as well as supplying our very own vintage china hire.

Why Young Women? Why Work Experience?

Through some research carried out for Turtle Dove Cambridge by Intentionality CIC it was highlighted that in 2015 there were 308,000 inactive NEET young women compared to 164,000 young men.

This could be due to a variety of reasons such as a lack of confidence, early pregnancy, domestic violence and abuse all leading to young women not actively seeking to access education, employment or training.

According to the report for Charity Education and Employers Task Force, young people are five times less likely to drop out of school or training if they have had work experience opportunities.