Our Mission
ABOUT
Invisible Cities is a Social Enterprise. This means we are a social business with a social conscience. We dont believe in labels or stereotypes and we want to show that everyone has great potential, a fact reflected in our tour guides.
We train people affected by homelessness to become walking tour guides of their own city and offer these alternative tours to tourists and locals.
Our training focuses on confidence building, public speaking and customer service. We partner with professional tour guides to build bespoke tours and practice our routes.
THE TEAM
Our Guides
Each of our talented tour guides have experience of homelessness or social disadvantage. They have seen their city from many more angles than the average tour guide can offer, be it the famous landmarks or the social enterprises that make this great city what it is.
Founder - Zakia Moulaoui
Zakia is from France and has been living in Scotland for 10 years.She has worked with local and international charities. After working as Director of International Partner Development at the Homeless World Cup Foundation, a global network of street soccer projects she worked for Scottish Social Enterprise Social Bite and the Social Enterprise Academy.
She founded Invisible Cities in 2016 and now dedicates 100% of her time to it, managing the team in Edinburgh and finding ways to replicate it around the world.
In 2018, we started replicating Invisbile Cities in other cities, with Manchester, to be launched in June 2018 and Glasgow in August 2018.
In each city, we partner with another organisation and develop a team to make it a success. Are you interesting in having Invisible Tours in your own City contact Zakia here!
IMPACT
All of our guides have experienced homelessness before and we believe:
- Homelessness is not always what people think.
- People don't need to sleep rough to be considered homeless. They can be staying with friends, in B&Bs or in hostels.
- Homelessness can and does happen to everyone for all sorts of reasons such as.loss of a job, health issues, family breakdown etc.
At Invisible Edinburgh we know this and want to share our view that at the end of the day, people are people. We want to create a dialogue between the public and our guides.
Click here to read our 2017 Impact Report
OUR EVENTS
As a social enterprise, 100% of our profit is re invested in the development and education of our guides or is used to organise events for the wider communities of the cities we are in.
In Edinburgh we facilitate the Street Barber (Edinburgh) events where we give free haircuts and toiletries to homeless men, directly from the streets.
In 2018, we started offering "Pampering Days" to homeless women in the city.
We believe everybody should get to feel good about themselves, even if it is only for a few hours, after having been pampered.
Check out what it means here:
