SWINES, FLU AND WHY I START A BLOG NOW...

So I feel ill again and despite 18 hours of kip in the last 24 am still tired... I am never usually ill so this is very dull... However the social enterprise must go on so I have been down and checked the place out after last night's musical meanderings and paid some much needed funds into the hungry bank account.

This blog is a kind of a record (albeit late in the day) of me running a social enterprise in the UK. I  opened in January 2007 a set of rehearsal rooms for young musicians to play, learn and record their own music in a safe and secure environment. I did this after my 14 year old got locked in above a pub while rehearsing (God knows what would have happened if there had been a fire), I also went to look at a place which had cannabis growing in one of the rooms and no toilet. (This was more depressing because it was funded by the council indirectly!!)

So we have made a place for young people to begin a process where they make websites, design logos and flyers, set up gigs and generally learn a ton of skills. I borrowed £25,000 on my mortgage and off we went. I knew we could easily break even but genuinely expected that the youth services at the council would welcome me into their fold as (to them) a totally free addition to their pathetic offering of stuff to do for young people. But no. It seems young people having nothing to do is something they are prepared to “talk” about and to “theorise” upon and do multiple expensive “reports” on but not actually do anything to change.

The youth service in this town is in a mess. The people that run it are very decent people but they work within a system that stops them changing anything. They are risk and enterprise averse and genuinely just do not get what we have done here. They have youth workers who in my experience have not got a bloody clue what they are doing. They work 9 til 5 Monday to Friday... just when young people don't need their services which again is utterly staggering. I have tried to get a meeting now with my “area person” for the last 6 months and in between a wedge of holidays, mulitiple cancellations and now sickness absolutely nothing has happened.

We employ 7 young people who all learn what the real world of work is about and that is the key here. Setting up social enterprises (real ones) creates jobs and income for the town and gives much needed paid work to a group who find it hard to get.

I don't want this to be a rant although it could easily become that because despite setting up the only safe under 18 nights this town has ever seen I got no support from the council and have now had to stop them for lack of a venue in town. (Not because they weren't well attended.)

I will add more flesh to the bones of this soon but how a town with such potential amongst its young people can have a council that does so little for them really makes me very angry. Up to now I have voiced my anger in a quiet non public way. That strategy has failed so now I have to change my direction and start saying things they just won't like. Short of them trying to shut me down what have I or the hundreds of young people that use us got to lose by being compliant?