Eventful life behind business with social conscience

But it also has its roots 900 miles away in Warsaw where, at the time, the Solidarity labour movement was battling the regime of General Jaruzelski and setting in train the events that would eventually bring down the Iron Curtain that divided East and West.

It was here that her uncle, Zbigniew Stanczyk, and a group of friends produced independent newspapers challenging the official Communist media monopoly.

While he was in the US finishing his doctoral thesis in late 1981, the Polish regime introduced martial law, so he stayed in California with his two sisters.

His family spread out and Mrs Moncuit, then a small girl, was brought up in London.

Today, she is a Doncaster businesswoman, running an events management company with her husband, Melvyn, and also a social enterprise for women in business.

Although much of the drama in her family took place more than two decades ago, it has left her the with the desire to help those who have missed out on economic prosperity.

This is reflected by Icon Events' contract wins over the last

year, which include several enterprise and growth initiatives, such as Doncaster Council's Community Learning Champions Project, Middlesbrough Enterprise Gateway, Yorkshire Chemical Focus, Alliance and Leicester and Help for Heroes.

Her family background, she says, "has been very important to my upbringing – people that wanted to make a difference".

"They lost everything. That drove a lot of my core values.

"We have always been faced with poverty because the poor will always be with us.

"The core value for me is convincing the public sector it is very, very important community work with people who have been very disengaged."

Icon is on course to turn over 250,000 for 2010-11 and Mrs Moncuit, a fluent French and Polish speaker, wants to grow the business further and to reach 1m turnover in three years' time.

Despite the success of the business – Mrs Moncuit owns 51 per cent and her husband, the event services director, 49 per cent, in order to keep

it female-driven – the couple still live in the same modest former railworkers' house in the Hyde Park area of Doncaster, which they bought for 24,000.

It is hardly in keeping with the image of glitzy parties one normally associates with events managers.

"We are not an events company but an engagement company, if there is such a thing.

"We do feel we are rolling up our sleeves and finding out what makes people tick.

"It links back to my team work with Government."

Mrs Moncuit came to South Yorkshire to be a researcher for the New Deal for Communities, set up by John Prescott when he was Deputy Prime Minister, but her taste for austerity goes further back.

She has been working with the poor, or those in suffering for several years.

Aged 19, Mrs Moncuit had aspirations to become a war reporter and accompanied the peer Caroline Cox to the Nagorno Karabakh region of Azerbaijan, which there was then a conflict.

It was there that she found what she said was her true vocation, uncovering a person's story and getting across a message to make a difference.

Doncaster businesswoman's solidarity with her polish roots

Solidarity, the Polish trade union led by Lech Walesa, emerged in 1980 after disturbances at the Gdansk shipyard.

During this time, Zbigniew Stanczyk, Emily Moncuit's uncle – who had been involved in the anti-communist underground since the mid-70s – published independent newspapers to challenge the Government's version of events.

In late 1981, Mr Stanczyk went to the US to finish his doctoral thesis at Stanford University.

Martial law was introduced in Poland and police came to his house to arrest him but found he had stayed in California.

The state authorities threatened to confiscate Mr Stanczyk's family's

property but they gave their home to the church to open an orphanage.

Mr Stanczyk stayed in the US and took a job at Stanford organising archives of the Polish government in exile, which was based in Britain during the Second World War.

He has been travelling to Poland since the free elections in 1989 to help its government find information on modern history.

Today, Mrs Moncuit, who is half-Polish, is helping build trade links between Britain and Poland.

She has worked with the British Polish Chamber of Commerce and runs

business courses designed to encourage Polish people in the UK to start their own businesses.