Make Your Mark Blog

A young man from Lowestoft has been chosen for the prime minister’s Global Fellowship - having found success during the Make Your Mark Challenge.

19 year-old Richard Miner from Lowestoft, is one of 100 young people chosen for the prime minister’s Global Fellowship - a programme designed to encourage and nurture oustanding talent and enterprise.

Depsite his obvious hard work and talent, Richard credits his success to the Make Your Mark team and his participation in the Make Your Mark Challenge whilst at school. During the challenge,  Richard and a group of friends established ‘UnHeard Entertainment’, a music management and PR company and as a result of their success, went on to attend the Make Your Mark in Music networking event in london, with Richard also becoming a founding member of YELP (Young Enterprising Lowestoft People) - a local network set up with the help of the local Make Your Mark team.

Richard says:  I believe strongly that getting on this chance of a lifetime, is in part due to the huge amount of support you and the whole Make Your Mark collective  gave myself and ‘UnHeard Entertainment’. It certainly allowed us to all become more knowledgeable about the ways of business and helped greatly in building a self-confidence in ourselves. The experiences that I have had due to ‘Unheard’ were priceless and I personally have a lot to owe you for those and the contacts made from Make Your Mark.”

As part of the fellowship programme, Richard is due to spend six weeks in India including two weeks in a school or college working as a language assistant and two weeks as the guest of a global company to get an understand of international business.

In November, Richard and the other fellowship members, will join the prime minister Gordon Brown to take part in ‘Global Entrepreneurship Week’ as part of the Make Your Mark campaign.

The Eastern Region Make Your Mark Team would like to congratulate Richard on this fantastic achievement and highlight how participating in Enterprise Week can really help young people to make their mark!

It’s official - we’ve hit 61! This is the number of countries which have signed up to Global Entrepreneurship Week. Inspired by the UK’s Enterprise Week, this will be the world’s biggest-ever week celebrating and promoting the entrepreneurial spirit amongst young people.

Watch out for events and activities happening near you! To see more, check out www.unleashingideas.org.

The full list of countries is on at http://www.unleashingideas.org/countryhost. And to get involved in the UK, sign up at www.enterpriseweek.org.uk.

According to tech experts a new microblogging service called Plurk may be the Twitter for teens. I’ve only just got my head around Twitter so to be honest I’m rather glad I’m too old for Plurk. We have a Make Your Mark Twitter feed which you can follow online or via your mobile to get the latest links to information from us or our partners, in a shorthand form. It’s a bit of an experiment but I like the fact it feeds into our Facebook page to keep that group updated.

What I think is even more interesting is how community groups and individuals might be using Twitter to tackle social issues. So, for example, I could see it being used to share hints and tips on mobility or coping with certain treatment programmes like chemotherapy, which I understand can be an isolating experience. We’re hoping to discover some of these examples as they emerge through the UK Catalyst Awards.

I’ll keep on Twittering but I think for me Plurk might be a step too far.

At a time when food prices are rising it’s never been a better time to save some money by growing your own food. On TV Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is encouraging some families to do it in Bristol through a small-holding and it’s really changing the way they think about food - for the better. According to his programme, if there is enough demand councils legally have to give people access to redundant land to grow their own food, which I think is something more people should take advantage of.

I helped at the Thrive Garden in Battersea Park today, as part of the Open Squares scheme. I was truly amazed and delighted to see how many community gardening schemes exist across London, tucked away in small pockets of land. Not only are they used to grow food, but also to aid people with learning or physical disabilities and to tackle a whole host of issues.  They truly show that being enterprising is about more than making money (although they need to do that too), it’s also about the individuals who use their passions and interests to change things for the better. In this case it’s gardening and I can only hope that this current trend for ‘growing your own’ continues.

Lambeth Council in London invited our Lauren, who looks after all things Enterprise Week, to join their very first Youth Enterprise Steering Group meeting…

She met a very inspirational bunch of people including representatives from the Council and the Lambeth Business Support Network, a very well connected gentleman from Connexions, a lovely lady from LSBU, a friendly chap from Young Enterprise London and Luisa from Red Ochre who runs the Youth Enterprise Project which helps young people from Brixton get started in business.

The group had some fantastic ideas on how to make their Enterprise Week the most exciting in London, including a mass Speednetwork the Globe event (see enterpriseweek.org.uk/globalactivities for more info) and an event connecting students on the Young Enterprise London Company Programme with Lambeth Business Award winners.

Lambeth see Enterprise Week as a great opportunity to engage young unemployed people, young offenders, people leaving care and young mums in enterprise activities, and plan to run an event every day of the week! It’s really great to see lots of different organisations working together and we wish them every success and happy planning.

I really hope that Honda is an enterprising brand through its employees, not just its advertising campaign. Which I think is ace. They’ve inspired me today…

As we turn the corner of a new era, we need new people to help us continue with our enterprise message - As the new HR manager I am excited to have some great opportunities available to continue the enterprise message through our people. We are looking for people ready for new challenges and passionate about what we do - whether you are a self confessed enterprise junkie or want to embark on an amazing new journey you might just be in with a chance - so who’s in?

Vanessa

Enterprise Junkie - and - Make Your Mark HR Manager

We were asked by the British Council to help out in selecting the top 100 young people to get the experience of a lifetime. They get to spend 6 weeks this summer is China, India or Brazil getting to know the culture, people, businesses and schools.

As the experts in enterprise we assessing the candidates on their enterprise capability. So I devised a challenge for the candidates to work in teams to come up with an idea to raise the profile of an NGO in one of the host countries. The case studies were all real and gave the candidates a really good basis of info to come up with some amazingly innovative ideas.

They decided to do everything from run a network to keep volunteers involved in the programme year round to recycling wrist bands to create new ones for their NGO. My favourite PR stunt which they came up with was to project their logo onto Buckingham Palace.

All of the candidates really shone and came up with fantastic ideas and presented them really well to the panel. I’ve learnt that being a panellist is a really tough job - it takes a lot of energy and the afternoon break was really needed to keep my energy up.

Good luck to all the candidates and I’m sure they’ll have an amazing adventure when they get to their destinations. For more info on the Prime Minister’s Global Fellowships take a look at http://www.globalgateway.org.uk/Default.aspx?page=4120

A colleague in USA just stumbled across this on YouTube… Bilimoria with advice on being an entrepreneur… irreverent title, but fairly serious/inspirational content.

Check out dieselwall.com - they are looking for designs to go on huge buildings. The deadline for the huge Manchester wall (28 x 18m) is 18 May so there is plenty of time to think of some designs. The wall is huge and so is the opportunity. We might do one from Make Your Mark, maybe something around failure but it would be good to get lots of others submitted too. Any budding designers pls give us a shout! 

last week, the global entrepreneurship week planning team in london met up with several host organizations from western europe. we all met in paris and were hosted by les journees de l’entrepreneur (http://www.journee-entrepreneur.com/) and ernst & young, who very graciously provided us a brilliant meeting space on the 38th and 39th floor of their building in la defense.

there were 9 countries represented at the table, including france, spain, germany, denmark, holland, greece, norway, italy - and of course us from the uk! campaign experts from make your mark led 5 workshop sessions over the course of the day and a half, covering topics such as possible activities and evaluation through to PR and sponsorship. (many thanks to hannah, cathy, scott, anjoum and mike paice for that!)

it gave us all a very good opportunity to learn more about the campaigns in each other’s country, share some best practice, and generate some fantastic new ideas for the first global entrepreneurship week this 17 - 23 november.

i took loads of pictures and videos from the sessions but i don’t have the cable to transfer them to my laptop! i’ll do that tomorrow, so stay tuned

in the coming days i will be creating an online space where will upload all of the materials we used and talked about, and where everybody who attended can share their notes and continue the discussion virtually. if anybody’s got a suggestion for an easy-to-use online service that could do this, let me know! somebody told me about basecamp?

for me, the 3 biggest things that came out of the workshop were…

1. work in national coalition! we want global entrepreneurship week to be huge in every country, so people need to work in partnership - and usually with organizations bigger than themselves. by spreading the responsibility, you will divide the cost - and reach more people.

2. work better internationally! hosts need to communicate more with each other and we need an easy and effective way to do this. once the online workspace is up and running, let’s share all our stuff and keep in touch with each other.

3. go with the glow! i think we were all impressed by how much support ernst & young offered us in paris. build on this by working with ernst & young in your own country, as well as with our other global sponsors and partners. if you need intros, you know who to ask… (this goes for people in the uk, too)

chris

Having left the BBC Your Game event last Wednesday I continued onto the Spark Women’s Business Workout (also in Bristol) which was a really inspiring event for women who either want to set up a business or grow an existing one. Amongst others I met the founder of Sew Bespoke who makes custom wedding dresses and was keen to grow her business further. We also heard from Alex Lovell,  a local BBC presenter who inspired us with her story of how she got to make her mark in TV presenting and news reading. There was a real sense of support in the room and it felt like people were really benefitting from talking to others about the issues they were facing. Being an entrepreneur can be isolating so events like this are a great way to link up lots of individuals.

Having left Bristol I went to Paris to run a PR and Comms workshop for some of the people hosting Global Entrepreneurship Week across Europe. It was a great experience and I found out lots about the state of ‘enterprise’ in different countries. We had a shared vision to encourage more people to be enterprising, and it was interesting to hear about the different ways this was being approached. I am even more excited about Global Entrepreneurship Week than I was before and think it promises to be huge! And I hear the latest number of countries is 56!

I worry that I can be too London-centric in my work so last week was a brilliant opportunity to get a fresh perspective. And the cheese at the lunch hosted by Ernst and Young was also a highlight. Bon Apetit.

It’s been a busy week at Make Your Mark and Tuesday was a real highlight….it was our London Make Your Mark Meet-up, the event we run for Connectors, Ambassadors and Enterprise Week organisers. Lots of you came along to find out more about Enterprise Week in November 2008 and there was a real buzz down at the Unicorn Theatre near London Bridge.

If you couldn’t make it and you want to sample a piece of the action, check out this Animoto clip I’ve just created. 

If you want to make a clip like this then visit www.animoto.com. I’ve just spent two days on a Mediasnackers course and this is one of the things I discovered. There really are some amazing things on the internet, and they’re free too!

Just been on a v cool training course by the gang from http://mediasnackers.com/intro/

If you want to learn more about the potential of social media and all things digital then this is the course for you. We saw some inspiring examples of the power of shared content:

http://www.invisiblechildren.com/home.php - if this isn’t an enterprising idea which has been turned into reality I don’t know what is! We should use this as inspiration for Global Entrepreneurship Week (www.unleashingideas.org).

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8602472107022912201 I love the cup stackers. Over one million people have viewed this film. Unbelievable.

Hopefully you’ll begin to see Make Your Mark folk being more digital-savvy, using video and audio to inspire and empower. Watch this space…

And if you have any other examples of where people have used social networking and digital technology to make their enterprising ideas happen please tell us and share the inspiration!!

ps just found this - better version of evite for sending out invitations http://www.pingg.com/event/view/ZQzZ0Wc-zZ05v?new=true

Check out the latest BBC online blog http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7315598.stm

from entrepreneur and Make Your Mark ambassador Kulveer - who has just sold his company which he runs with his cousin for ‘millions of dollars’.

His move to Sillicon Valley in the States has undoubtedly played a part and I wonder whether we can ever hope to reproduce this fostering environment for tech companies in the UK. It’s a point which Kulveer raises within a view point he wrote for us last year.

http://www.makeyourmark.org.uk/policy/future_face_of_enterprise/who_else/viewpoints/stoz/

Let us know what you think…