Yvonne Zhang, Associate Partner at Bain & Company shares her volunteer experience working with one of SBT’s social enterprises: Speech and Language UK.
Yvonne, a former maths teacher at Teach First who joined Bain & Company in 2014, and a soon-to-be mother of two, has always been passionate about education and children. When the opportunity came up to help Speech and Language UK on a pro-bono basis, Yvonne jumped at the chance.
Speech and Language UK support children who have difficulty talking and understanding words. They do this by designing tools and training for schools and nurseries, providing advice and guidance to families, and running two specialist schools. Their pioneering resources give teachers and families the confidence to help children develop crucial skills. As more children struggle with talking and understanding words, Speech and Language UK are lobbying government to provide greater support, so more children are not left behind, waiting to be understood.
Speech and Language UK had developed a new strategy, which included trying to connect the work in its two schools with its work in hundreds of mainstream schools and early years settings across the UK. This was a major step for the organisation, and it needed more clarity on how to realise this vision.
Over three months, Yvonne, alongside two Partners and three Analysts from Bain & Company, collaborated with Speech and Language UK’s senior leadership team. They created a thorough fact base of trends and opportunities in the education market, in order to lay the groundwork for Speech and Language UK to determine where they wanted to focus. Close collaboration was critical for the success of the project and so the engagement included multiple in-person workshops and regular weekly calls to ensure progress and alignment. Through the course of the workshops, Yvonne and her colleagues helped Speech and Language UK’s leadership team to align on their 3–5-year purpose and the initiatives required to realise their goals. In the process, they made tough choices about where to focus and what to prioritise.
Through this process, Yvonne gained valuable insights into what ‘success’ looks like in the charity sector. In the corporate world, profits and share prices provide a clear benchmark, but with Speech and Language UK, success was measured differently. Working closely with Speech and Language UK’s leadership team she needed to determine whether impact was defined by quality, quantity, or a combination of both—ultimately broadening her perspective on what meaningful outcomes look like beyond traditional business metrics.
Having left teaching for the corporate world, the project reminded Yvonne of how passionate she is about the education sector and showed her that she was able to leverage the skills she developed at Bain & Company to give back, making the experience highly rewarding and validating her choice to move sectors. “I learnt such a lot from the project. Working with a small organisation meant that I got to the know the social enterprise and people on a deeper level. It was great to know that our work would help Speech and Language UK reach more children and improve their lives. The whole journey was a two-way learning experience, opening my eyes to the incredible impact that social enterprises like Speech and Language UK are making and the countless lives they are changing.”
In return, the team at Speech and Language UK were impressed by the approach and facilitations skills that Yvonne and her colleagues brought to the project. Jane, CEO at Speech and Language UK, said, “Yvonne was skilled at getting everyone to contribute – this is really important in an organisation with multiple sites and with leaders who do not interact on a daily basis. As a result of this work, our relationships and collaboration have set off on a new footing as well as having more clarity about our medium and long-term priorities.”
For Yvonne, this was more than just a project—it was a perspective shift. “When I started to learn about the services that Speech and Language UK offered it really humbled me. I was happy to know that if my children struggle with speech and language issues in the future that there were organisations like Speech and Language UK out there which can offer fantastic interventions.”
And her advice to anyone considering volunteering? Just do it. The impact is real, the experience is priceless, and you might just gain more than you think.
1 May 2025