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Entrepreneur’s Workshop With LOCA

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Creative Connections

Date:          Wednesday 21 July

Time:          6.30 – 8.30 pm

Venue: 51b Holme Bank Mills, Station Road, Mirfield, WF14 8NA

(From Mirfield go under the bridge for Mirfield railway station and turn left following the road with the large sign for James Walker Properties.

From Hopton turn right just before the Mirfield railway station bridge and following the road with the large sign for James Walker Properties).

Creative Connections are quarterly events for artists and creative businesses in and around North Kirklees, run by Loca as part of its Creative Business Support Programme.

As well as encouraging the development of a supportive and well connected community of creative people within North Kirklees we are also encouraging people to look at their businesses more professionally and with more of a critical eye. With this in mind we have a very motivational and thought provoking presentation to offer to you.

Mike Chitty is a writer, trainer, coach and adviser on enterprise and entrepreneurship.  Despite having a background in physics his work strikes a chord with creative people and artists of all kinds.  In this 30 minute session Mike will provide a fast paced, honest and highly practical introduction to The Entrepreneur’s Workshop and introduce us to 10 powerful tools that can help us make sure that our creative enterprises serve us rather than the other way round.

Twitter: @mikechitty
Facebook: mikechitty

As an extra bonus, we are holding the evening’s event at the new studio of Andrew Warburton, Area Rugs and Carpets where you be able to view inspirational work by Andrew, Dylan Edwards and Amazed Rugs.  Andrew will once again demonstrate the production methods he uses to create his bespoke, high quality rugs and there will be the opportunity to have a go for the more adventurous among you.

Creative Connections is a chance to meet informally with other creative people to pick up ideas, information and contacts which may be useful in your work.  It’s also a great opportunity to promote your own work and what’s going on creatively in the local area, so please do use it as a platform to let people know about events or projects that you are involved in, or to sound out interest in an idea you’re developing, or to request information.  Why not bring along your portfolio, brochures or other visual material to show your work to others and help develop your contacts?

The Loca team looks forward to seeing you at Creative Connections.  Please contact us if you have any particular access needs.

Please park in the free car park. Andrews studio is under the barriers to the right. There are three small steps up to the workshop with handrails.

The evening is free and light refreshments will be provided.

RSVP to Loca on 01924 488844 or email: loca.admin@loca.co.uk

Fiddling while Rome Burns…Again?

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As someone who remembers the Small Firms Service, Manpower Services Commission, The Training Agency, TECS, Business Links and the establishment of RDAs, I refuse to be overly exercised by the development of Local Economic Partnerships.

We know that they will have significantly reduced budgets.  We know that they will be led by some concoction of ‘private’ and ‘public’ sector with a seasoning of social enterprise for good measure.

We can be relatively sure that they will have considerable bureaucratic overheads – necessary to ensure openness, accountability and probity and that they will tie themselves up in the same debates about economic development policy that have raged with sterility for decades; picking winners, encouraging start-ups, clusters, sectors, creative classes, beautification, yada, yada, yada.

We know that they will be very heavily influenced by professions allied to construction and engineering. Planners, place-makers, architects, developers who can throw big money at making sure they retain the lion’s share of public spending even as the spending pie shrinks.  One just needs to look at the key ‘Partners’of the current Regeneration and Renewal National Summit to see the evidence.

We can also be sure that they will embrace a strategic, top down approach to economic development that pretends that economic development happens in a bubble that is disconnected from cultural and social development.  No doubt these too will get their own shrivelled strategic bodies.  The paradigm of economic growth as an unmitigated good will hold sway in the strange world of economic development.  Ideas of sustainability and steady state will not be seriously entertained (unless of course they paradoxically provide opportunities for growth).  Visions will be developed by the anointed, and most of us will see the world of economic development at best, ‘through a glass darkly’.

Facilitation is unlikely to get a look in.  Whole person approaches will be ignored (economic development will continue to speak to homo econimicus), co-creation is as close as we will get to responsiveness and bottom-up. And let’s be clear, co-creation as conceived by the state is nowhere near responsive and bottom up.  It still asks ‘how do we engage people in the agenda of the state’ and not ‘how do we engage the state in the agendas of the people’.  For me this is the ultimate deceit that lies at the heart of ‘Big Society’ and that needs to be carefully and thoroughly outed.

We can also be sure that those who actually live in the communities and give their time and skills to help make things better will be expected to do so for free as budgets for community development shrink and are increasingly targeted at problems (obesity, crime, drugs etc) that see humans as essentially degenerate instead of at the development of aspiration, hopes and dreams which see people as essentially good and progressive.

So I refuse to be exercised.  LEPs will evolve.  They will be largely ineffective in spite of the fact that they will be stuffed to the ginnels with good, committed, well meaning people.  And in a decade they will evolve again.  The sign-makers, website developers and letterhead printers will rub their hands with glee.

I will put my energies into supporting bottom up, responsive approaches that honour peoples humanity, that build social capital, that value the contributions of all, regardless of sector, ambition or potential.  And I will keep looking for genuinely innovative approaches to the thorny question of progress?

In practice this means helping others to develop initiatives like Bettkultcha, Cultural Conversations, TEDx Leeds etc (we are blessed with a resurgence of such civic endeavour in Leeds) that holds real promise to nurture something very exciting.

But I will also endeavour to provide some contributions of my own.  For me this means trying to develop Progress School and Innovation Lab as places to foster radical personal and organisational transformation.

And just perhaps we might be able to persuade those in authority to trust us, to support us, to help us.

Who knows?

Making Social Marketing Work – 29th July Leeds

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This practical workshop will introduce you to the theory and practice of social marketing – how to use marketing techniques to achieve specific behavioural goals designed to lead to social good.

Whether you are trying to promote healthy lifestyles, encourage people back into work or to start a business, get back into education, or engage in a campaign, an understanding of social marketing can help you to:

  • find new people who want to work on your agenda
  • support them on their journey to make real change happen
  • get the right people at the right events at the right time

What Will You Learn?

You will learn how to:

  • Develop marketing collateral (leaflets, posters and websites) that might just work
  • Use the media effectively – PR and role models that work
  • Build ‘Word of Mouth’ strategies and referral networks
  • Work with ‘gatekeepers’ to ‘gain entry‘
  • Manage introductions in the community

The day will involve some theory and explore a number of examples of good and not so good social marketing campaigns.  Participants will have the opportunity to apply what they learn to a real campaign of their own.

Agenda

What is social marketing and how can I use it?

What behaviours are we trying to promote?

Using Segmentation to Increase Impact

Eating an Elephant – bite sized chunks….

Social Marketing Tools – with a focus on emerging social media (twitter, facebook, wikis etc)

The Role of Traditional Marketing and PR

Developing a Social Marketing Campaign (making a start)

Marketing through Relationships and Networks

Find out more and book your space – http://socialmarketingworks.eventbrite.com

Dad, I Want to be an Entrepreneur! Will You Help?

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These are not words I am expecting to hear anytime soon – but who knows?

If David Cameron gets his way and he finds an army of entrepreneurs to go into local schools to promote the ‘joy’ of entrepreneurship and the job market continues to go west – it could well happen.

How would I respond?

Well, if they say they want to be an entrepreneur and ask for my help, then I will refuse it, and do all I can to persuade them away from the idea.

If they say they have to be an entrepreneur – because it is the only way they can do the work that they feel they have to do then I will roll up my sleeves and help with enthusiasm.

Why the distinction?

Because however you wrap it up, in spite of what people like Cameron say, entrepreneurship is hard.  Especially if you do not have a large bank account to bale you out when things go wrong.  I don’t think I have met a single entrepreneur in my work who would describe the experience as joyful.  Dramatic, yes.  Full of highs and lows, yes.  Scary, yes.  But joyful…not so much.

So why promote the lie?  Why continue the enterprise fairytale?

It doesn’t even help to build an enterprise culture as with increased start-ups come increased failures and more bad experiences of entrepreneurship.

It couldn’t be to do with an obsession with outputs over social impact could it?

I will leave the last word to Noel Coward:

Some years ago when I was returning from the Far East on a very large ship, I was pursued around the decks every day by a very large lady. She showed me some photographs of her daughter – a repellant-looking girl and seemed convinced that she was destined for a great stage career. Finally, in sheer self-preservation, I locked myself in my cabin and wrote this song – “Don’t Put Your Daughter On The Stage, Mrs. Worthington”.)

Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs. Worthington

Don’t put your daughter on the stage

The profession is overcrowded

The struggle’s pretty tough

And admitting the fact she’s burning to act

That isn’t quite enough

She’s a nice girl and though her teeth are fairly good

She’s not the type I ever would be eager to engage

I repeat, Mrs. Worthington, sweet Mrs. Worthington

Don’t put your daughter on the stage

So Em amd Meg – unless it is something that you have to do, ignore Messrs Cameron, Brown (remember him – architect of much enterprise policy) and their army of enterprise evangelists and give entrepreneurship a miss – at least until you have some real knowhow under your belt.

On the other hand if this is the only way that yo can do good work, and you are prepared for the journey that lies ahead, then, and only then, let’s go for it…

Big Society Business Support in Leeds

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On Friday afternoon @culturevultures convened one of the best business support/development sessions I have witnessed in the last 30 years.

Some 30 creatives came together in a room donated by a local managed workspace to provide peer to peer support on a range of topics related to marketing, branding, writing and social media.  Lots of expertise in the room, lots of desire to explore and learn.  No-one labelled as an adviser – no-one labelled as a client.  Just lots of people willing to share what they knew and ask for help with what they didn’t.

No public funding at all.  Just people donating whatever they thought it was worth.  Donations were used to help pay for cupcakes and cocktails and an afternoon of fun.

Business development as it should be.

This is what the public sector could be paying for.