The Next Generation
Posted: 26 November 2010, in Blog
I gave up on Star Trek after it went through too many line up changes, the scriptwriters lost the plot and the make up and wardrobe folk had an attack of the vapours. I’ll still watch Kirk et al because of the familiarity and the daftness of it all. I particularly like the facile racial stereotypes with Scotty being a (subordinate) engineer and Spock’s alien lugs setting him apart. Unfortunately, the producers had to replace the original stars and the whole thing just lost its way.
I can now see that hot tattie appearing in the social enterprise sector – where are the replacements for our stars?
So, what I suggest is that we give £250 to teams of (young <25) potential social entrepreneurs. We find them in the largest 56 cities and towns of Scotland and every small island that has a permanent population of over 100 (see Wikipedia). Team members would attend a (regional) SSEC Bootcamp to be inducted into our way of thinking and doing. To get £250 they would participate in a new social enterprise competition where the rules are simple.
Each team has 6 weeks to invest this money and any other money they can raise to create a social enterprise in order to make some more money. At the end of the six weeks they return the £250 (if they haven’t got £250 they make up the difference), keep any profit and get on with running their enterprise as they see fit – or they could shut it down. The winners in a range of categories would get £2500 to invest in their business and the support of a team of social enterprise advisers if they want to incorporate and keep it going.
Points would be awarded for the quality and quantity of their ideas, degree of difficulty in carrying out the work, specific achievements, the use of technology and the big vision thing of their social mission.
They would also get additional points if they used social media to broadcast their stuff to their own age group but, profit would get the most points and the scoring system would be weighed towards this.
I’d envisage local schools, colleges, youth groups, churches, existing social enterprises and notable local worthies backing this idea. (I’d kind of lean on social enterprise staff to get their own kids involved).
There, a ready supply of young people who are calculated risk takers, tolerant of uncertainty and ambiguity, highly confident, needing to achieve, not fearing failure, wilful and possessed of all the inner stuff that change-makers display ; exactly what Scotland and our sector needs.
There would be a big party at the end.