Make Your Mark Blog

After the heady excitement of Enterprise Week and the banana fuelled activities of the Challenge, we decided to let loose in the only way we know how…through dance of course!

Enjoy.

I read a very good blog this morning about taking the plunge and setting up in a downturn. Though a very popular subject at the moment it’s still really helpful to get lots of different perspectives. So my wish, aside from getting this and this for christmas is for you to check it out and chew it over.

Cheers

PS: And because it Christmas I can post stuff like this….

Funny.

Local business ‘Coast and Country’ have set local secondary schools a challenge. They are opening their doors and inviting students to take a look at the reception areas of Coast & Country at Grange Town, Spencerbeck, Dormanstown and Skelton.

The Challenge

Students form the Redcar & Cleveland area are invited to spend time at the reception areas of Coast & Country at Grange Town, Spencerbeck, Dormanstown and Skelton. Students will have to look at the reception area from a customer’s perspective and suggest improvements. The teams will be invited to present in the Coast & Country board room in front of panel of business people.

Make Your Mark challenge finalists, ‘Stripes’ we’re undoubtedly my favourite team of the competition - not only had they had the brilliant idea of an online Olympics fantasy-team competition, the brainy bunch made the website themselves as well - already!

I should confess a slight bias - I was their ‘buddy’ on Tuesday: a job, it appears, I was under qualified for. Despite repeated mockings for having a video camera glued to my hand, I only managed to get one publishable video (and even that reveals a career in film is out of the question). Yet its a pretty exciting one - taken whilst they were recording their radio ad with Make Your Mark’s very own James Sandy and Ben from Radioville.

With the help of two businesses in the region, it cost less than £320 to help 18-year old Dean Jeffries turn his life around from not having a great deal of burning career ambition to actually setting up his own social enterprise and wanting to take it forward as a real career opportunity when he leaves school.

Dean who is from Catcote School in Hartlepool has blossomed academically since undergoing the YENE Team Programme, which is an educational enterprise programme for people aged 15- 19 with learning difficulties.

The following is taken directly from the Global Fellowship website and gives and overview of the project:

2008 marked the launch of the Prime Minister’s Global Fellowship, a pilot programme for 100 young people from England, designed to take them through a series of new inter-cultural experiences that will highlight issues of language, culture, economic growth and development in one of the three of the world’s fastest and most important emerging economies. All Fellows are 18 or 19 years old and finishing full-time education or apprenticeships, are drawn from a wide range of socio-economic backgrounds and represent a truly multi-cultural and multi-ethnic England. This opportunity marks a conscious step in developing the skills and confidence to turn the challenges of living in an interdependent world into opportunities and the ability to make the most of them. No matter where or how they live, it matters that today’s generation of young people grow up understanding first-hand what globalization means for all people.

At the Make Your Mark Challenge national final on Tuesday, I was lucky enough to meet the team from St Peters School. This multi-talented group had it all! Their idea was to set up ENable, an organisation that would help educate able bodied people about disabled sports, like wheelchair basketball and football for the visually impaired. They made a great presentation - the whole team answered questions, and you could tell how important their idea was to all of them and how well they’d thought it through. Their many other talents included making extremely realistic snoring and cheering effects for the radio advert they produced for ENable, and eating a bowl of mint humbugs in a fraction of the time it took any other school.

Our friends at Eastside Consulting, the social enterprise advisory experts, have launched Spark a fab competition aimed at social enterprises with a focus on homelessness. Managing Director Richard Litchfield tells us more below:

“Spark has opened its doors for social enterprises to enter a unique 9 month programme to secure finance and build their capacity. We have prizes worth up to £1.6m to invest in winning organisations.

“We are looking for organisations that are using an entrepreneurial approach to prevent or tackle homelessness. We are particularly interested in social enterprises that have services that provide opportunities and employment to people who are homeless or at risk of being homeless.

During Enterprise Week 3 local colleges who helped re-launch the Federation of Small Businesses’ Keep Trade Local campaign.

The winning photographs have been revealed! Here are the 6 winning shots (in no particular order!), they really capture the spirit of the campaign and will be featured on the Federation of Small Businesses’ 2009 calendar.

Well done to the students of Hartlepool Sixth Form, Prior Pursglove and The English Martyrs Sixth Form!

Thought I’d make quick post about one discussion topic in particular from a mini think tank I attended in Berlin this weekend. The topic: sustainable development in the world’s least developed countries.

There was just a little bit of a clash between free-marketing economists and the more idealistic (if ever so slightly less practical) members of the think tank who focused on social cohesion. I’ll let you guess which camp I fell into with the help of these clues: I usually read the Guardian, my favourite hobby is knitting organic muesli for disadvantaged and socially excluded members of the community, and, aside from the fact that I can’t count, I’m not fully convinced that The Market even exists.

I was a buddy yesterday at my first ever Make Your Mark Challenge Final and must say I absolutely loved it, great job all round Tori and team!

The creativity, effort and professionalism of the students was so impressive particularly during the pitching session. If there were nerves to contend with they certainly hid them well - the 10 groups in the 16-19 category delivered faultless presentations to the panel of judges that would give any Dragons Den contestant a run for their money!

Even though I had only met them that day, I couldn’t help feeling pride when my buddy team Wheatley Park School came second in the Challenge - woo hoo! Their ‘value bands’ must have caught the judges’ imagination and I had my eye on their prototype ‘rainbow’ bands (hand made by the girls in the team!). I will def be collecting them when they no doubt hit the shelves in 2012!!

The team and their winning wristbands:

The team receive their prize from Matt Littler and Darren Jeffries!:

Their thoughts on winning 2nd prize:

Mikey Naylor, from Selby High School, had a great time this week when he and nine of his mates went to visit Xing, a smoothie company in Hull.

Having launched a competition to ask students to come up with a great name for a brand new smoothie, Mikey put forward the winning idea - ‘Yum yum, healthy tum’ giving him and his friends the chance to spend a day with the smoothie entrepreneurs.

Not only were the team able to ask questions about the company and how it all started they also got the chance to whiz up their very own tasty treats – our tummies are rumbling at the thought!

Well, what a month and more importantly what a CHALLENGE - our biggest and best ever!

Special congratulations have to go to Crawshaw School in Leeds and Holy Trinity Senior School in Halifax for their fantastic efforts in reaching the Make Your Mark Challenge national finals.

The competition was fierce and although the schools didn’t take the title of national Make Your Mark Challenge winner they certainly proved that enterprise is alive and kicking in the Yorkshire and Humber region.

Well…what a day! Yesterday saw 21 teams from schools across the UK meet at Kings Place, London to decide once and for all ‘who is the top banana?’. Tori (Challenge and Club Manager) and I have been busy organising the National Final for the Make Your Mark Challenge 2008 for weeks now and the hard work payed off yesterday (even if I say so myself) the event went without the hitch and I think that was mainly down to the high standard of the fabulous contestants!!