What is LightsOnXP, and what does it set out to do?
My name is Ollie Newton, I am a lived-experience speaker, trainer, and the founder of LightsOnXP. We work with businesses to strengthen their workplaces while creating meaningful Social Value across education. We deliver mental health initiatives, lived experience talks, accredited training, and give organisations access to our digital platform and events.
Every piece of work we deliver in organisations pays forward into education and funds assemblies, mentoring, and employability support for young people across the UK. For organisations wanting to go further, we also deliver large-scale projects and CSR projects across education that communities really need. These stories create real conversations, they have a real impact, and we're seeing real change.
What does Social Value mean to you?
Social Value is often seen as an add-on, when actually it should sit right at the core of the business. Every organisation has a purpose. They have their values. The challenge is often living them day by day. So what we try and do is bring that to life. We try and offer stories with real people, and real impact across the communities. All of a sudden it goes from being writing on a wall to something real - something they can feel and connect with - which builds trust, because people know when something's authentic.
It also has a huge impact on the culture of the business, because where you help us give back to the communities, we will also support your staff through talks, workshops, and access to our platform year-round. It's an ecosystem approach where we're helping everybody. There's a commercial reality to that, too.
When your people are engaged, and your brand is aligned, that absolutely underpins the bottom line. That's the work that we're most proud of.
Oly Newton, Founder, LightsOnXP
Why is it important to have businesses on board with what you do?
The difference it makes when we get businesses on board is that it takes the little idea, from being impactful to being scalable. We ran a project a couple of years ago, which became the blueprint for the work that we deliver today.
I wanted to deliver as many talks as I could over a month period, which was 20 academic school days, and I came together with another speaker to try and deliver 100 talks in 20 days across as many schools as possible. We floated that idea around to organisations, and very quickly we had a few bites. This is where we started to understand the Social Value element of it.
We very luckily got two huge companies - one in construction, and another, probably the biggest education recruitment company in the United Kingdom. They got behind the mission, and it was unbelievable. It enabled us to impact 25,000 young people. What businesses bring is not just the scale, but the fact that they bring people, network, influence and employees engaging with the purpose who can come along and witness the mission that we're on.
It becomes really, really powerful really quickly, and relatable as well. The ripple effect is huge.
Oly Newton, Founder, LightsOnXP
How does your work connect mental health, education and employability?
Our team of speakers cover everything, but it all comes back to employability. If students aren't engaging in school and they're struggling to voice how they're feeling, it's always going to come back to that. If they're not attending school, they fall into that bracket where they're not in training, not in school, not in any workplace.
For us, it's about bridging that gap. We can bring people in, we can work with construction organisations who are aware of the gap they're facing from an employability perspective and who probably need more young people to come through the industry. Not only can we create those conversations from a mental health perspective, but we also know that there are a lot of neurodivergent people on construction sites, and those young people would probably really benefit from understanding what routes they could go down, what the career paths look like.
It's the same with any organisation. These young people don't really know what's out there. We can offer the mentoring programmes, give them those life skills that they really need, and hopefully create jobs and opportunities for them to work with these organisations later down the line
How did you end up in this space?
I stumbled into this space around about four years ago when I set out on this mission to start sharing my story. I was coming out the other side of Covid, and a lot of organisations were struggling to manage their people; they couldn't really afford to pay for everyone's therapy. So I came in to create conversations, and hopefully get some people to reach out for the help and support they needed.
The thing I'm most proud of is the concept I came up with, where every time a corporate organisation paid me to deliver a talk, it included the sponsorship of a local school of their choice. It's been one of the most magical decisions I've made, because it's enabled me, over the last three or four years, to speak across over 170 schools in the UK and to nearly 80,000 young people. It's created some of the best conversations I've ever had.
My journey started when I was really young. I was seven when I had early warning signs of OCD, and I was struggling in school with ADHD - I got a late diagnosis of that. Because for me, I never spoke about it. I was the happy kid, the funny kid, the class clown. Cracking all the jokes. When deep down, things were going on internally that were causing me a lot of pain.
At twenty-one, I went from being that lad that brought everyone together, to all of a sudden waking up one morning feeling like someone had turned the lights off. I went on to lose ten years of my life to severe mental illness because I just didn't speak about any of these things. Ultimately, I wanted to be that voice that I desperately needed as a child. If I could get into these schools, start opening these conversations, and get that early intervention, I just knew they wouldn't have to go through what I went through.
What do you see when you walk into schools today?
Young people, more often than not, probably know more than adults. They're taught about mental health in school, taught about resilience, and taught about things we were never spoken to about in school. When they hear someone like me, or someone in the team that I've built - incredible lived experience speakers who talk about all sorts of different topics like racism, diversity, inclusion, trans experience, addiction, eating disorders - it can really open up these conversations and encourage that young person to take their first steps, which they so often do.
Often, we've got queues of young people waiting to speak to us, to tell us that this is the first time they've ever spoken about any of these things. And because of the support that schools have in place, they usually can get help. They can start conversations. We know that the NHS is really overrun, and it can take a long time to get that professional help. But ultimately, seeing people like us coming forward and speaking for the first time is really the key to what we do. Because yes, we've got stories, but every young person has a story too.
The difficulties they're facing now can often lead to the reason they help others, become a nurse, become a doctor. For me, that's the most important thing.
Oly Newton, Founder, LightsOnXP
For organisations exploring how to measure and report the Social Value created by the work Oly and his team deliver, it maps directly onto three TOM System measures that procurement teams, local authorities, and combined authorities increasingly look for evidence against:
NT8 — Volunteering time in local schools through talks and mentoring. Every assembly, lived experience talk, and mentoring session delivered in schools represents measurable volunteer time on behalf of the LightsOnXP team and from the employees of partner organisations who engage directly with the mission.
NT98 — University-level expert support, including lived experience, career insight, and resilience coaching. The depth and specialism of speaker programmes - drawing on accredited training, lived expertise, and a team covering everything from mental health and neurodiversity to addiction and inclusion - meet the standard of expert support that NT98 is designed to recognise.
NT99 — Structured site visits specifically for school children. Where organisations bring young people into their workplaces as part of LightsOnXP's employability and exposure work, this maps directly onto NT99 and contributes to measurable careers education outcomes, connecting the communities that need it most to the industries that need them.
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