Victoria Reeves

WOW! Today was one of the most surreal days of my career! Prince William's team asked me to spend the day with him visiting businesses in the south of England that are doing great work to end homelessness! 🥪 We started the day in a @Pret (Pret A Manger) in Bournemouth! We put on aprons, made coffee's, sandwiches, and more importantly got to meet some of the incredible team members that are former refugees, former inmates and formerly homeless! (We bumped into Paul Gascoigne which added to the surrealness of the day for me!) ⚽️ We drove over to Bournemouth FC and met players from the Men's and Women's team who had come through the bounce back program and used football to change their lives. I met players that had gone from foster care at 18, to playing for England! 🎤 I was lucky enough to have a few moments to ask the future king some questions on his own personal motivations, how we manages and allocates his time! 👩🏻‍💼 Myself and Prince William then hosted a business round table with a group of local business leaders about how the business community can do more to hire more homeless individuals into our organisations! This is just the beginning of a big piece of work we're planning to do with Prince William, his Foundation Homewards and the UK business community to help get homeless people (and former inmates) back into work, to up-skill them and to end homelessness for good! 🤯 Side note: If you had told me as a kid, I would be spending the day with Prince William, the future King - I would never ever ever believed you. I grew up with a Nigerian mother and a English dad who both adore the royal family, one of my earliest memories is watching my mum and dad cry when Diana died. William has a wonderful way with people, and he was authentically kind both on and off camera, incredibly intelligent and so patient! Thank you to whatever force in the universe put me there today, I'm so grateful and a little confused. A day I'm sure I'll tell my kids about. If you're a business please do check out @HomewardsUK work! Together as a business community we can do a lot more to get all the talent we have in this country back to work! ❤️