Enterprise UK Blog

A few fellow MYM’ers and I travelled to Paignton yesterday to do a couple workshops in the lead up to Global Entrepreneurship Week in November.  I delivered a presentation on the campaign’s global outreach, and offered some ideas and tips on how to run a globally focused enterprise activity.

There were some great ideas shared by the partcipants, and here are a few of them:

• Rather than looking at how social enterprise and innovation can improve living conditions in the poorest countries, we are going to look at how they can improve living conditions in the richest and most developed countries – particularly in New Orleans, USA, where there has still not been any significant re-development since Hurricane Katrina in 2005 (from Dave Salter, West Exe Technology College in Exeter)

I suggested that Dave could look at charities and NGOs that are already working in New Orleans to see what challenges and issues they are facing, which he could then introduce to his students.  The first one that came to my mind was Habitat for Humanity UK.

• Women’s Enterprise Day would be a great opportunity for me to reach many of the female population at our school, given most of our students are girls.  I’ve found that the boys are much more inclined to take risks and focus on what is actually achievable, whereas the girls tend to be much more conservative and risk averse (from Diane Methley, Hayesfield Girls School in Bath)

This was a really interesting insight from Diane, and precisely why we encourage women and girls focused activities during Global Entrepreneurship Week.  I let Diane know about the Make Your Mark Ambassadors programme, which involves of hundreds of inspiring young entrepreneurs who volunteer their time to speak at school events, and to share their stories with students.  Role models really help young people to gain in confidence and would make a positive impact on Diane’s students.

• For Global Entrepreneurship Week, we want to connect our students with students from schools in other countries through the catering industry.  We are planning to create an online repository of student-created recipes in which all our partner schools can contribute.  We already have one partner school in South Africa, and thought that it would be really cool to track our way, school-by-school and country-by-country, down the meridien line until we reach South Africa (from William Downey and Debra Douglas, Filton College in Bristol)

I thought this was a fantastic idea, and took great advantage of a study area and industry that is so important to FE colleges.  A wiki would be a great way of collecting recipes from around the world – my favourite free wiki sites being WetPaint and PBwiki.  I suggested that the DFES/British Council Global Gateway would be a helpful website in finding partner schools in other countries, as well as being a useful resource for finding ‘next-step’ funding opportunities should they want to take their students to visit any of their partner schools in person.  Finally, thumbs up to the ‘meridien line’ idea – it makes things much simpler in terms of time zones!

If anybody else has ideas to share, or suggestions on how to make these events a reality, please comment below 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 at 11:36 am and is filed under Global Entrepreneurship Week. 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.