Our Story
LAUNCH & YEAR 1 (Sep '17 to Aug '18)
At 2am on the 5th April 2015 our founder jumped out of bed with an idea. She believed that practical, hands on, real trading youth led business experiences could engage and develop young people who were Not in Employment, Education or Training (NEETS). One month later on the 6th June, the company was incorporated as a Community Interest Company (CIC), because the dream was to become at least partly financially self-sustaining rather than rely wholly on Charitable funds. Our founder spent the next 2 years building contacts, developing partnerships and seeking funds.
Unable to secure funding until she could provide any proof of concept, our founder took a leap of faith and, impatient to start and prove that the concept worked, she self-funded our very first week long Enterprise Challenge on the 31st July 2017 in a community centre with 2 volunteers, 2 borrowed laptops and only 6 young people.
Astounded by the engagement, capabilities and results from the first challenge, we ran our second challenge where another group of 6 young people organised a Teenage Battle of the Bands event. The challenge took place in the October half term, as well as the weekends of November and December 2017 to see if we could sustain engagement for more than a week. 6 month after the first project, 50% of the young people we had worked with kept asking to come back for more, so we had enough case studies and testimonials to show that what we did worked. This enabled us to secure our very first funding grant of £3,500 to run 2 week long video production challenges.
Word started to get our about our project, and 2 education institutions asked us to run pilot projects where we took our youth enterprise activities into school to use as an alternative curriculum to re-engage targeted students. The students ran a fashion upcycling project, and a teen market project, making and selling their goods. The projects worked so well we were asked to expand the programme and provide a quote for the next academic year, showing us how we could earn independent income for our financial sustainability.
YEAR 2 (Sep '18 to Aug '19)
As we headed into our second year we held our AGM to get feedback on our first year, and all of the participants said they wanted a longer term project that ran every week for then to take charge of. A real, trading youth led business of their own, and one participant in particular came up with the idea of a youth magazine. We ran one more funded week long challenge, this time for an urban arts challenge for those who were more creative.
We then secured £5,000 funding from the #iWill fund to launch our own youth led magazine which would be a year long project, so in the February half term of 2019 a team of 12 young people set up #iDare – an online blog and printed magazine that would run every Saturday and be published at the end of every month. As our flagship trading youth led business, the project attracted a team of up to 20 young people every week producing content. making editorial decisions and managing the team finances. The website attracted up to 500 young people every month, all whilst running from a donated training room for the 3 hour session each week.
Just as we were starting to struggle to run out of borrowed venues, we won an innovation competition run by Nationwide Building Society, who then sponsored a 4 person office in a shared workspace for a year. This office space led to us being able to expand the magazine project, run charged for schools projects our of it, and employ a part time apprentice to help coordinate our growing activities. We started to secure funding to cover our operating costs, and set our sights on further expansion.
YEAR 3 (Sep '19 to Aug '20)
The first 3 months of our third year saw us search for new premises, as our sponsored space was coming to an end, and we already needed more space to run our expanded projects out of. Just before we moved out, we ran a teen market project, where our participants made and sold a range of self-made goods, and in November ‘19 we moved into our own 2,000 square foot dedicated premises, and the youth team organised their very first black tie awards ceremony to recognise the teams accomplishments on the #iDare magazine project.
The additional space in the new office enabled us to run bigger projects with schools, as well as launch our second long term trading youth led business, building on the skills that had been learnt through all of our other shorter projects.
In February 2020 we launched “The Digiteers”, a digital media marketing agency, which saw the youth team use their developing skills in social media management, website design and videography to help local not-for-profits improve their online presence. The youth magazine was running every Saturday morning, and the Digiteers were starting to operate on ad hoc weekday sessions when in March 2020 COVID-19 hit and the project ceased all face to face sessions during the first 3 month lockdown. During the 1st lockdown, we continued to support our participants through virtual mediums, but they were all keen to return when possible, so we reinstated our sessions in June ‘20 with additional precautions. However, the downtime and the predicted post-pandemic impact on youth unemployment caused us to reflect upon our model and implement some significant changes.
YEAR 4 (Sep '20 to Aug '21)
Pre-COVID, we had realised that our projects, although working with young people who had significant barriers to succeed in life, were engaging with our projects consistently, and many were actually moving back into education or into work as a result or identifying realistic career paths from their project experiences. We therefore embedded this learning and upgraded our objective from ENGAGING young people to PROGRESSING young people, adjusting their experience with us to developmentally lead them into education, work or self-employment.
In order to enable our project to scale up significantly enough to make a noticeable dent in the post-COVID expected rates of youth unemployment, we turned our disparate projects into a coordinated internship. Our participants attend our sessions for an average of 2 days a week to undertake the youth enterprise projects in the environment of a ‘training workplace’ – developing skills, confidence and CV experiences that will directly help them take their next steps.
We added a career mentoring service, where our interns are assigned a mentor who has built a career in the same vocational area they are interested in, who then works with them to build their network, seek work experience opportunities, and support them in finding work. We also added an employer engagement service, where we proactively broker relationships with local employers to provide career talks, skills swaps, work shadowing and prioritised access to entry level interview opportunities.
And our youth led business projects were run as part of a structured development plan, where all interns participated in all projects, including setting up a self-employed business, as part of a 6 month structured internship. They consequently learnt project management skills, teamworking, goal setting, managing meetings, liaising with clients, and all whilst using Teams and other professional IT packages as you would in a full scale job. As a result of this coordinated development programme, our success rates increased significantly, with up to 90% of our interns going into work, further education or earning a self-employed income.
Increased Confidence
All of our enterprise activities are designed so that participants have positive, stretching experiences and see tangible success in a real environment. Because of this, 100% of our participants said that they had improved confidence after just 1 weeks involvement.
Employability Skills
New Experiences
We run a range of different enterprise activities, enabling our participants to try new things, find out what they like and are good at, and build their CV with new experiences and achievements that wouldn't be available through traditional options like work experience.