Growing up on a Manchester council estate, Amy Newton remembers doing jobs like collecting glasses at the pub and working in a pork scratchings factory.
And speaking on The Northern Agenda podcast this week, she describes how her passion is ensuring people with backgrounds like hers can get the high-paid, high-skilled jobs in swanky city centre offices which might seem off-limits for kids on estates half an hour away.
"Kids of alcoholic parents tend to be pretty good at budgeting. Because you get £4.30 at the start of the weekend, you need to get your school lunch out of that. And you might need to get a snack on the way home from school because guess what, you're 13 years old, so you're hungry. "And what I think is quite interesting about the difference between growing up without money and growing up with money and again, this is a generalisation, I can't make that clear enough, but what you sometimes see with people who have grown up without money is a hunger that is difficult to shake.
"And less than half an hour away you've got these offices in Manchester that have got ping pong tables, beer fridges, grub club, Franco Manca pizza, food, drinks. Some of the offices are absolutely beautiful. There are now more than 10,000 digital and tech businesses in and around Manchester, representing a digital ecosystem worth some £5bn.