A not-for-profit built on the chance one stranger gave him.
Founder
Neil Tregarthen
“Nobody can help everybody, but everybody can help somebody.”
After an unhappy adolescence in Cornwall, Neil arrived in London for the first time on his 19th birthday, with £150, no job, and nowhere to live. A London cab driver and his wife gave him a chance: a camp bed in a small linen room until he could find work.
Forty years later, Neil returned to Cornwall, having built and sold a business with a turnover of more than US$1 billion. He created Stand For to do for young people exactly what that couple did for him.
Neil Tregarthen grew up in Cornwall. By his own account, his adolescence was unhappy, the kind of beginning that, for many young people, never gets corrected.
He learned early what it feels like when no one is in your corner.
On his nineteenth birthday, Neil left Cornwall and arrived in London for the first time. He had £150 in his pocket. No job. Nowhere to live.
The cab driver and his wife let Neil stay in a small linen room, on a camp bed, until he could find work and a place of his own. It was quiet. It was costly. It was kind.
It was the moment a stranger decided that Neil mattered. It was the moment a different life began.
He has never forgotten it.
“Nobody can help everybody, but everybody can help somebody.”
Neil Tregarthen · Founder
Over the four decades that followed, Neil built a career and a business. He worked, built things, took risks, and eventually sold the company he had created, by then a business with a turnover of more than US$1 billion.
That part of the story isn’t the point. Money was never the point.
Forty years on, Neil returned to Cornwall. The county he had left at nineteen, with nothing, was the place he came back to, with the resources, the relationships and the resolve to do something that mattered.
He created Stand For to do for young people exactly what that cab driver and his wife did for him. Not charity. Not a fund. A chance.
Stand For is the answer to a question Neil has carried for forty years: what if somebody had not given me that chance?
It exists for the young people who are facing that question right now, and who, without somebody, will not get an answer.
Talk to the team about supporting Stand For, whether that’s a direct contribution or by referring a young person we may be able to help.
