Completing the Toolkit

Local Treasures believes that work is good for you, especially as you age. Work keeps you fit and healthy, financially independent and socially included.

As people get older, the way they want to work changes. For a wide variety of reasons, such as caring responsibilities, health and hobbies they demand more flexibility. Most work opportunities do not allow complete flexibility, which means many older adults leave the workplace for good in their 50s and 60\.

Local Treasures exists to provide completely flexible work opportunities for the over 50s, doing gardening, cleaning, handymen services, companionship, dog walking and more.

The jobs are accepted by the worker via our proprietary automated matching platform.

Local Treasures operates in towns across Hampshire. Over the past few years, we have been building a toolkit to launch and operate Local Treasures from anywhere in the UK.

The toolkit encompasses a fully automated matching platform, a digital and local marketing programme and a customer support and benefits programme.

There is one final tool outstanding to complete the toolkit:

\* worker support and benefit programme.

This Innovate UK project allows us to **Complete the toolkit** by developing technical innovation for the final tool. It can be split into two parts:

1\. Ambassador support
Stage 1 - completed
\* A blend of tech innovation with real, in-person support in each town
Stage 2 - In progress
The success of the Ambassador element has been critical in developing the business plan to launch Local Treasures as a franchise operation.
To do this, we will create an interactive web portal to onboard and develop franchisees as we launch town by town.

2\. Job security

\* Technical solution to incentivise longer term bookings and to provide an e-commerce solution to the business as it scales.

The franchisee interactive web portal is an extension of the project following on from the success of Stage 1 of the Ambassador programme. It is the final tool in the tool kit required to enable Local Treasures to launch and operate town by town across the UK.
We will launch into new towns across the UK for the duration of this project and in doing so, will provide 225 older adults with flexible, local work opportunities.

Future scaling

**Completing the toolkit** project, will ensure we have a tried and tested toolkit to launch Local Treasures using a franchise network and will enable us to scale town by town across the UK and to provide thousands more older workers with access to flexible work.