One Day Can Make A Difference

A regional campaign aimed at encouraging more businesses to support enterprise education has smashed its initial targets – benefitting over 1000 additional young people in the North East.

At the beginning of last year, enterprise education charity Young Enterprise North East set a target to sign up one new businessperson every working day throughout its 18-month ‘One Day’ campaign.

The One Day call-to-action campaign, supported by regional development agency One North East, was targeted at business owners and encouraged them to sign a pledge to give up either one day of their time, staff, expertise or profits to help support the region’s future economy and create the next generation of entrepreneurs.

Now, as the campaign ends to make way for a fresh call to action, organisers have announced that the campaign has beaten initial targets by signing up 72 new businesses and recruiting a whopping 180 new volunteers to help deliver enterprise education lessons in classrooms throughout the North East.

Since the campaign inception, almost £2000 in cash donations was made to the charity, through business fundraising events, which will ensure that an extra 1333 young people in the region will benefit from YENE enterprise education programme.

The campaign also encouraged businesses to allow students to undertake work experience placements and job shadowing – since its launch an additional 350 students visited a workplace.

Young Enterprise North East chief executive Catherine Marchant said: “When we first set the initial target to sign up one new business every day throughout the campaign we thought we were being ambitious. The number of businesses and individuals that have given their support and that we have actually beaten this target has staggered me.

“New businesses that have come on board include Royal Mail, the Department for Work and Pensions as well as smaller enterprises such as Aycliffe Fabrications and Carrot Media - all of which have made such a huge difference in the way we can now deliver a more robust, credible inspirational service.

“Our aim was to also keep the flame of enterprise alive in young people and with this wider support from regional business community, I believe we have been able to plant the seed of enterprise in more young people’s minds and have certainly helped to develop more enterprising attitudes and work based skills.

“The fact that the One Day pledges were so flexible and could be implemented into daily business life has been the crux of the success and we have even had businesses implemented YENE activity as part of their CSR plans.”

One North East head of business, enterprise and skills Tim Pain said: “The One Day campaign was an excellent way of showing businesses just how simple and easy it is for them to inspire the entrepreneurs of the future.

“Equally, the young people who have taken part have been able to develop their enterprise skills by meeting real-life entrepreneurs, spending time in a business environment and seeing how ideas grow into a new product or service.”

Now, Young Enterprise North East is planning the next phase of its promotional drive, which will focus on looking beyond the recession and preparing for an upturn. It will seek to gain longer-term and more sustainable commitment from the business and education community. The official launch will be in January.