About Our Founder

About Our Founder

About Our FounderSuhail is living proof that every child is an individual, with passion and potential all his own. He’s also proof that amazing things can happen when that passion and potential are nurtured.

Suhail wasn’t especially wealthy and had a particularly challenging time, growing up in the 70’s, and his interests were a little unusual: he was both a competitive boxer and a champion chess player. The combination seems bizarre at first glance. But the skills he learned from those pastimes – discipline and practice from boxing, strategic thinking and decision-making from chess — proved to be a potent combination. When he was only 14, Suhail found he couldn’t afford a membership to his local gym. Ever the problem solver, he came up with a solution. He started a gym of his own.

The gym was just the first of many successful enterprises for Suhail. Just five years later, at 19, together with two partners he established a sales and marketing company. Today he’s a business and social entrepreneur with 25 years of international experience, still thriving on the challenges of the marketplace. He has held both main and senior board positions in the retail, consumer goods and charity sectors, and was Chief Executive for a global retail and distribution business. Even with such achievements under his belt, Suhail never stopped creating new ventures. He has won awards for Fastest Growing Business and Best Retailer of the Year.

Suhail and his unfailingly supportive wife, started giving to children’s charities after they had their own children — two beautiful daughters. But they were frustrated by the lack of lasting change they saw those charities making. In 2007, Suhail created the Hand2Hand Foundation, an organisation designed to apply everything he learned in business to turning around young disadvantaged people’s lives.

By the end of 2015, Hand2Hand worked with young people aged 16 – 26 to complete over 6500 programmes in employment, training, enterprise and education. It delivered incredible results, with over 95% of its young people overcoming their difficult backgrounds and developing strong values and character traits. What’s more, it accomplished all of this without taking public, government or institutional funding — Hand2Hand is entirely supported by passionate private investors and commercial / corporate partnerships.

But Suhail felt that he could do more good by reaching children at a younger age, empowering and enriching their values at a critical time in their lives. And so in 2011 was born his greatest ambition to date: StepUp Learn.

Suhail’s own life proves the importance of programmes like StepUp. Coming from challenging beginnings, he was able to make a positive impact that is not only international but also intergenerational.

StepUp’s goal is to work with existing academics, educational providers, local and national governments help children across the world develop their critical thinking and own free will to achieve their biggest ambitions, just like Suhail did.