At Easynet Connect, we, like many, believe it’s important that businesses of all shapes and sizes do all they can to put something back into local communities and support the growth of new UK businesses.
This year, we took the decision to support Young Enterprise, the UK’s main business and enterprise education charity whose vision is:
“That all young people will have the opportunity to gain personal experience of how business works, understand the role it plays in providing employment and creating prosperity, and be inspired to improve their own prospects, and the competitiveness of the UK.”
Young Enterprise achieves this through a range of activities and programmes including helping groups of school children set up and run real-life businesses and enterprises.
Young Enterprise has been going for 40 years and consists of 12 regional organisations. It reaches more than 350,000 young people a year thanks to the involvement and support of 3,000 UK businesses around the country.
We have found that Young Enterprise’s driving vision is not just inspiring in itself, but was particularly timely and a vision which we are proud to support and promote in the best ways we can. Besides sponsorship activities, we are committed to supporting Young Enterprise by engaging directly with the young people it helps by sharing our business knowledge and experience. This involves Easynet Connect staff from across the company working in local secondary schools as part of the Young Enterprise Company Programme activity, where students set up and run their own business.
Our staff are already running workshops and holding master class programmes with groups of students from a number of schools in areas important to us, such as the Shepton area of Somerset where much of our customer and support services are based, Buckinghamshire and in Central London, where our head offices are based.
As well as lending our expertise and support to workshops and master classes, we also take great pride and interest in judging and sponsoring Young Enterprise’s local and regional Innovation Awards which currently includes the ‘Best use of Technology’ award for the South-West region. This year’s winners of our Technology Award,Affinity, went on to become the National Winners of the overall Young Enterprise Innovation Awards.