As Scotland grapples with one of the biggest tribes of Neets (those not in education, employment or training) in the western world, it is turning to the Prince's Trust as a role model for engaging business with disadvantaged young people.

And when the trust needed a new chief executive at short notice last year to lead the mission, it turned unexpectedly to an accountant who knew nothing of the charitable sector.

Geraldine Gammell, however, now divorced from Cairn Energy founder Sir Bill, has injected a business plan, and one year on has fired up the organisation with an ambitious approach that is catching the imagination of potential backers across corporate Scotland.

The trust's network of 50 staff based right across Scotland oversees and delivers programmes in its communities, but work in the shadow of hand-to-mouth, one-year funding from the public sector.

"The Scottish Executive has been very supportive of our programmes and activity but beyond '08 we have no public sector funding, that means we have to spend a lot of our time at the moment focusing on that," Gammell says, adding smartly: "The Executive are listening to how much more efficient we could become, and they are becoming more businesslike."

The trust can boast that 70% of the young people who go through its programmes make it into permanent employment. By contrast, 64% of those who spend time in prison go on to reoffend. It may not be an official statistic, but it emerged when Gammell hosted a visit to Polmont young offenders' institution for Prince Charles earlier this year.

According to a report from the London School of Economics published in June, Scotland's Neet generation of young jobless is costing the country £1.7bn a year in crime, lost productivity and educational under-achievement. Almost one in five young people in Scotland are not in work, education or training, but the £2m a week cost of jobseekers allowance is only a fraction of the real loss to the economy.

"The young people we are dealing with are at the bottom of the ladder of self-esteem," Gammell says. "It is an individual response and we get that absolutely right. We are less good at getting into the shoes of our other customers, our public and private sector funders, and understanding what we can deliver to them The right way is tell it in one page, sell the benefits."

Although married to a multi-millionaire oilman who went to Fettes College and knew both Tony Blair and George Bush personally, Gammell was brought up in the East End of Glasgow and went to school in Coatbridge, and says part of her attraction to the trust was "being a bridge between those two worlds".

Moving from a degree in English literature to accountancy training, Gammell's "baptism of fire" came when she left KPMG to become finance director for the Ash Gupta advertising group, then bought into the Springford's accountancy practice in the early 1990s. "There were three of us and we employed five people. When I left in 2000 we had grown the business to 70 people."

She adds: "My husband and I both worked crazy hours - we were competing to leave at six o'clock in the morning. I thought I don't really want to continue to do that."

The pace eased, leaving Gammell on the board of two property funds and the local acute hospitals trust. She says: "Life had a bit more balance about it, but work has always been really important to me, I liken my interest in work to other people's interest in golf or horses - I have always been interested in business connections and making things happen."

Then came her "life-changing event" - separation from her high-flying husband two years ago, when her two boys were 14 and 16. "What I knew when that happened was that work would become more important to me again. My plan was to sell the family home and move into town."

When the phone call came in March last year, asking whether she knew anyone who might be interested, Gammell was.

She immediately found the job "absolutely challenging and absorbing, something that was beyond making money - I wasn't in a position where I needed to make money".

She quickly instilled a new discipline in management reporting, and landed critical secondee help from the Royal Bank of Scotland, whose involvement typifies the trust's business "customers".

"The bank have been really brilliant to us. I thought - there is a real win-win here, someone who has only had bank experience and gets to meet politicians, royals and disadvantaged young people will not go back a better technical banker, but has stepped out of an organisation into another sector."

Five firms of lawyers are now competing in a "no holds barred" fundraising contest, each firm mentored by a leading entrepreneur (among them Jim McColl of Clyde Blowers), and Gammell reports interest from accountants and surveyors to get involved next. "I don't think there has ever been a time when need and appetite have come together so incredibly strongly to work for the benefit of Scotland - but we have got to talk the language of these other sectors."

Burness, the solicitor, had asked the trust to "go viral in our firm", Gammell says, to engage employees in activity that goes beyond simple fundraising.

She explains: "Major corporates are looking for some sort of level of engagement with something that is beyond the market and beyond making money." For those companies it is not just about ticking a corporate social responsibility box, Gammell adds, but "the much more powerful box of engaging employees" and using community projects to help build corporate loyalty.

She says: "People like us who are dealing in a very, very important area of society can give people who know nothing about it some insight and understanding."

The pioneering ScottishPower Learning programme, in its 10th year of enabling its own employees to learn at work, also delivers a programme for the Prince's Trust, and Gammell says: "ScottishPower are hugely into CSR and leading edge in what they have done."

Gammell hopes to see Scotland's colleges stepping up their engagement with the Neet generation, extending the present 12-week personal development courses into three-days-a-week placements "so they remain anchored". She would like to see closer working between Scotland's royal charities (Marks & Spencer, for instance, works with the Prince's Trust in England and Wales, but north of the border with Scottish Business in the Community).

And most of all she wants to engage employers. Gammell says the most pessimistic estimate of Neets is 35,000, but even if it is half that (excluding young people in gap years and in transition), the trust is currently only reaching 4000 of the most needy. She wants to see more employers following the award-winning M&S in recruiting disadvantaged and excluded young people. "They would like to give employment to young people, but they are not going through torture to do that. They need a mechanism that works and it is up to us to facilitate that mechanism."