Introduction
At ten years old, Avril Grant lay face down on her living room floor while glass rained down around her. Her family home in Birmingham had just been shot at, the culmination of years of racist targeting on her street. It is the kind of event that could define a life as one long reaction to injustice. Instead, it became the starting point of a career spent proving that no one has to be defined by what has happened to them, not the people she now works with in 36 UK prisons, and not herself.
Avril Grant is the founder and CEO of AVision [CHECK: exact company name and spelling, ASR-garbled in source audio], an organisation that has worked with more than 6,000 people through leadership courses, community interventions and, increasingly, prison-based rehabilitation programmes. Her journey there was not linear, and it was not comfortable. It ran through a teenage pregnancy, a stint sleeping in hostels, a qualification she did not want, and a moment at her accountancy desk when she realised she was living someone else's dream.
A childhood shaped by injustice
Growing up on a street in King's Standing, Birmingham, Avril's family was one of five Black families targeted by a group of racist neighbours. The abuse escalated over months: swastikas and NF signs left in plain sight, her mother's car burned out, her aunt assaulted. It reached its peak one evening while the family watched television together and someone fired a gun into their living room. The council's response was to move the Black families rather than address the perpetrators. Avril was given 24-hour security to get to school.
That experience, she says, shaped how she has approached the rest of her life. Rather than curdling into bitterness, it became a question she has spent decades trying to answer: why would anyone want to do that to another person, and how could she help people, including the kind of people capable of that violence, choose a different path.
Motherhood at 19 and a family of survival
At 19, pregnant and coming from a family she describes as strong, matriarchal and independent Black women, Avril left the family home and moved through four different hostels before securing permanent housing. She describes it as a period of pure survival, one where there was no room for a plan B because it would distract from plan A. She did not process the difficulty of that time until years later.
Her mother, meanwhile, made sure she survived the birth itself, delivering the same tough love that had shaped Avril's own resilience. The relationship between them was complicated for years, and Avril's own account of eventually accepting her mother exactly as she is, rather than as Avril wished she had been, is one of the episode's most honest threads.
Following her mother into accountancy, and hating where it led
Wanting to make her mother proud after leaving university as a pregnant teenager, Avril followed her into accountancy. She progressed from admin into purchase ledger and credit control, eventually training as an accountant while raising her son largely alone, with her aunt covering childcare because her mother made clear she had not signed up to be a grandmother on demand.
On paper, life looked complete: a good job, a home, a degree, a car. But Avril describes the growing sense that she was living someone else's dream. She had visions at work of people coming alive and thriving, and she began to understand that ignoring a persistent internal call does not make it go away. It just gets louder.
Quitting in the middle of a recession to write a programme from scratch
Avril gave her employer eight weeks' notice in the middle of a recession, telling her boss she was going to "inspire the world to achieve success." He told her she was mad. She left anyway, at 25, believing that if she did not take the leap then, she never would.
What followed was not a business plan. It was a period of low income and low mood following a difficult relationship, during which she sat down to write a self-belief programme, initially for herself. She describes the process as almost automatic: seven structured modules written in two and a half hours, despite never having written a programme before. She began delivering it for free in community centres across Birmingham, stopping shoppers in the street and asking whether they were achieving their full potential.
Learning to charge for value she was already giving away
Giving the programme away for free built genuine impact, and genuine debt. Avril describes living on dumplings, beans and noodles while running full courses in community centres, unable to bring herself to charge the individuals she was serving because she did not believe they could afford it.
The shift came when she recognised she could charge institutions, schools, colleges and universities, rather than individuals directly, for the same programme. That reframe let her scale the work without pricing out the people it was designed for, and it marked the moment her empowerment work became a sustainable organisation rather than a passion project running her into the ground.
From community centres to 36 prisons
A feedback form suggested she try delivering the programme in a prison. Her first delivery was at an open Category D prison, where she was, in her words, set up to fail: her sessions ran in direct competition with gym time on the association timetable. She turned up anyway, offered the first course free, and told the prison she would be paid when it delivered results, not if. It did, and it led to a contract, then a reputation, then thirty-six prisons across the UK.
Avril is clear that the same principles apply inside prison walls as outside them: people are not their convictions, and they can define their future regardless of what came before. The work extends beyond release too, through career pathway support, family reconciliation work and start-up grants of £1,500 for people who want to become self-employed rather than return to environments that put them at risk.
Realising she was living in a state of trauma
Avril did not recognise she had been living in survival mode, effectively in a low-grade state of trauma, until she reached her thirties. Being consumed by the effort of building a life left no space to process what had happened to her, from the childhood shooting to the isolation of early motherhood.
The work of unpacking that came later, and included consciously choosing to stop being judgemental of her mother's choices, deciding instead to accept her mother as the person she has chosen to be. Avril describes this not as forgiveness in the abstract but as a practical decision to stop putting her own expectations onto someone else's life.
