A new initiative that helps young West Cumbrians launch businesses with a social purpose has produced its first crop of budding entrepreneurs.
Cumbria Community Foundation launched Positive Enterprise, in partnership with the Centre for Leadership Performance, to help young people from disadvantaged backgrounds make their business ideas a reality.
Since January seven youngsters – five male and two female, aged from 15 to 25 – have received intensive mentoring to get their businesses up and running.
Their achievements will be recognised at a celebration event at Lakes College, Workington, on Wednesday July 12.
Annalee Holliday, senior grants, programmes and communications officer at Cumbria Community Foundation, said: “It’s great to see these ideas come to fruition. For example, we have a business that is repurposing food waste while another has set up a theatre academy.
“At the event, they will each talk about what they’ve done, what they have created and the support they have received. It will be an inspiring evening.”
The keynote speaker is Sally Phillips, a botanist who hit on the idea of making draught excluders from the wool of Herdwick sheep.
Her business, Chimney Sheep, set up in 2012 and now based in Workington, has gone from strength to strength and won a clutch of awards.
Positive Enterprise was launched in response to the success of a similar programme run by the Hunter Foundation in Scotland.
Open to young people aged between 14 and 25, who live in the former districts of Allerdale and Copeland, it offers participants a £1,000 grant, mentoring from an experienced businessperson and performance and leadership development through the Centre for Leadership Performance in Cockermouth.
The youngsters meet as a group fortnightly to compare notes and swap ideas.
Annalee added: “It’s not just a one-off grant. We wanted to offer support over a period of time. The aim is to challenge young people to think creatively and in more enterprising ways, to empower them to positively disrupt the status quo and to test out their enterprising ideas.
“We want to break down the barriers for aspiring young entrepreneurs by developing an enterprising culture based on encouragement and support.”
This is the first year of Positive Enterprise but Cumbria Community Foundation is already planning to repeat it in 2024.
The programme is funded by the Cumbria-based property developer Brian Scowcroft with match funding from Sellafield Ltd as part of its Transforming West Cumbria programme, the Low Level Waste Repository Ltd, Well Whitehaven, Morgan Sindall and Kaefer.
