Make Your Mark Blog

I visited the London winner for the Enterprsing Britain competiton last week. Wandsworth Youth Enterprise has been going for twenty years this year, so it’s what you’d call a sustainable initiative! The project provides a variety of services to young people, ranging from enterprise workshops, providing a forum in which to air ideas for the first time, through to in depth one to one business counselling, offering guidance through the challenging start up process. The whole initative is client led catering to the individual; the provision of such a bespoke service leads to phenominal success rates, with 85% of individuals who sign up to the programme going on to set up their own business.

We met a variety of youung people who are still based in WYEC’s incubation units. Everybody said how instrumental the programme had been in their success and many thought they would have failed without the ongoing support they received. Unfortunately we weren’t able to visit Trident Business Centre a second stage unit run by WYEC for more established businesses but it was pretty clear what an invaluable support the project is to young entrepreneurs.

WYEC have also taken their project model and turned it into an international success. Enterprise Development Worldwide, the international arm, takes the best practice established through the programme and uses it as a basis for setting up and supporting projects all over the world as well as in other parts of the UK. So far enterprise projects have been establsihed in several eastern European countries as well as the Carribean, Africa and Australia.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2008 at 2:56 pm and is filed under Enterprising Britain. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.