My column this week in the Herald Express 24th November 2011.....
This past week has been Global Entrepreneurship Week when globally folk come together to celebrate enterprise, innovation and that sort of thing. I always found the word entrepreneur somewhat daunting although these days it seems to pop up time and time again. Of course it has been around for many years and indeed try “Googling” (what an amazing computer search facility Google is!) and up pops a huge list. ‘Young Entrepreneurs’, ‘Famous Entrepreneurs’, ‘Entrepreneur Ideas’, ‘Entrepreneur Exchange’; the list goes on and on. Of course it is, as I am sure you know, essentially about business.
During the week events were held across South Devon by the various organisations tasked with encouraging people to be enterprising, to think about business, business start-up schemes business success award ceremonies and so much more. During the week I found myself spending an afternoon as a business mentor with a group of people who will soon graduate from the Devon School of Social Entrepreneurs based at Dartington. This was for me a good thing to be doing because I am fascinated and perhaps even captivated by the concept of social enterprise and, if you like, social entrepreneurship.
For those of you who bravely or foolishly read what I write will know that community action has always been near and dear to me. We live in hugely troubled times and the daily news brings a torrent of worrying detail about economic distress, financial inequality, rising prices, unemployment and perhaps a creeping loss of hope. But there is some good stuff going on, people doing special things, folk working for the good of all and more importantly refusing to be beaten down by the negative.
Of course much of the distress is about the loss of jobs, the worry about losing a job and the fear of running out of money or the reality of having no money. That is where many of the local entrepreneur start up schemes can be so helpful, especially when it comes to building social cohesion. You have only to look at what happened in London and Manchester last summer to see what happens when things tip over the edge.
In California some years ago Jesuit priest Greg Boyle coined the phrase ‘nothing stops a bullet like a job’ and that caught my attention. People, especially the young, need to be valued. Getting and hanging on to a job is being valued. Not getting or losing a job is catastrophic for the individual, for those around him/her and for the community as a whole. Enterprises and especially social enterprise can create jobs within a community and build a sustainable platform. One of the Dartington SSE students was in the process of developing a concept that had the fledgling title of ‘Crime to Career’ and looked at building individual talents into a meaningful career rather than slipping into crime. It is, at the end of the day about captivating a community and building hope.
Now one of the shadows of our time is the rise of unemployment amongst the young. We also live in a time of catching acronyms. One such acronym is NEET. Of course when you hear the word neat then all seems well but sadly NEET isn’t well at all! NEET is the growing band of people who are not in employment, education or training. That is needlessly to say very unhealthy for a society. It is here that the need for enterprise training and building social enterprise is huge. Enterprise is not, in my humble opinion, just about being able to run your own business. It is about collecting life skills that will also be of considerable benefit to breath fresh life into businesses that already exist and indeed to larger public sector organisations.
There are good things happening here on the English Riviera, Torbay, South Devon, Agatha’s Riviera, but they need nourishing. We mustn’t simply roll over and feel that there is nothing to be done because events like Global Entrepreneurship Week and organisations such as The Devon School for Social Entrepreneurs CAN make a huge difference. We simply need to be receptive to the message – said the voice too often ‘crying in the wilderness!’
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