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STREET 2 BOARDROOM
Roger Moore is not your typical business owner. After leading a 'dodgy' life on the streets of Bristol, in October he opened his second Roger Moore's Caribbean Cuisine restaurant in the city. Now employing 15 people, he has no intention of stopping there. "My ambitions are to open nationwide, and to release cooking sauces and other products," he says. Although he says he was never in trouble with the law, he admits: "I was doing things that, had I been caught, I would have been in trouble."
Moore makes no bones about the fact that the only reason he is where he is today is because of the intervention of the founder of a Bristol-based social enterprise. Set up in 2016, Street2Boardroom is the brainchild of Clayton Planter. "I knew Clayton previously, and he engaged me to get involved, but I didn't really listen - I fobbed him off to be honest," says Moore. But Planter persisted, asking him what he had to lose by attending the four-week motivational course.
Since doing the course in November 2017, Moore has barely looked back. "The biggest thing it gave me was confidence. It changed the way I think about things. It gave me a different perspective: that what I wanted I could actually achieve."
Planter, who works full time as a youth worker, says around 50 people have been through the course, with 60-80% not returning to a life of crime.
Bridging the gap
Planter says he was motivated to set up Street2Boardroom because of the lack of opportunities for many of the friends he grew up with in St Pauls and Easton, two of Bristol's most disadvantaged areas. He says some of his friends turned to selling drugs, with the result that several ended up getting into trouble with the law.
But alongside this desire to help others was his own frustration and, indeed, anger that despite having been head boy at his school and sports captain, and "doing things the right way" career-wise, things hadn't turned out the way he had been led to believe would happen. Rather, he says: "It's not what you know but who you know, what you look like and your network." Moreover, having worked for Bristol...