SOCIAL entrepreneurs have a role to play in keeping young people out of a life of crime.
That was the message from Graham Bell — chief executive of Kibble Education and Care Centre, in Paisley — when he spoke to the recent conference of the Institute for Small Business and Entrepreneurship, held in Glasgow.
Kibble — the largest centre of its kind in the UK - operates as a social enterprise and provides a wide-range of specialist services for young people referred to them by local authorities or the Children’s Hearing system. These services include residential, secondary school, secure unit, fostering and community support programmes.
Graham Bell told how a series of small business set up by Kibble under the name of KibbleWorks gives young people vital “real work” experience to prepare them for finding a job after they leave school.
And according to Mr Bell, this can be the difference between staying out of trouble or getting involved in anti-social or criminal activities.
He told the audience of entrepreneurs - including fellow speaker, multi-millionaire philanthropist Sir Tom Hunter: “Today we aim to work with young people in trouble - serious trouble - those that no one else can or will work with.”
“We are strongly committed to evaluating what we do and doing things in different and new ways to make things better for both young people and the wider community.”
“And we found that we were doing really well with youngsters while they were with us - all the indicators were positive and many extremely positive.”
“However, as we dug deeper we discovered that many of these young people were not doing well when they left - there was a wash-out effect on many of these young men. They were unable to stay away from trouble — not doing what penologists call desistance — so the alternatives need to be better.”
“As we researched further we found that one of the best of the better things was a job. But how do you get these young people into work? Many of them come from workless households, disrupted education, poor social skills, and low aspirations.”
“We discovered that we could get any amount of advisors, or counsellors, or short term training programmes, or character building courses, but could we get jobs?”
“And we knew that it was pointless going to employers — the young people were simply nowhere near ready.”
Mr Bell continued: “We discovered one other thing from the research — the nearer the experience was to a 'real' job the more effective the outcome for the young person - and society.”
“So we decided we needed to create businesses that employed young people - and the best bit of advice was never, ever employ teachers or social workers to run these businesses.”
“Get people who want to run a business while combining this with providing a pre-apprenticeship place to a young person. We have had extraordinary results in helping young people stay in employment, stay out of trouble and graduate into employment.”
Mr Bell added: “Today we have 24 young people in employment with us across this range of 16 small businesses, run by people who have started these businesses social entrepreneurs trying to get to a double bottom line - making our businesses more commercially viable and offering more of these business opportunities to young care leavers.”
“We want to use our experience to provide a real employment and enterprise based alternative to prison for many more young people - a safe, structured, stable and successful environment for young people.”