TSBC Response to the Anniversary of the Riots

 

London, 6th August 2012–  This time last year, our country was coming to terms with the the UK riots. The cost to businesses and the tax payer amounted to approximately £500m. Young adults conformed to commit acts of theft and vandalism which were brokered through social media, namely BlackBerry Messenger, Facebook and Twitter. Some of the young people were foolish at the same time “tech savvy” enough to upload pictures of themselves posing with their looted haul.

 

Amar Lodhia, Chief Executive of TSBC said: “The riots brought home that in fact ‘hard-to-reach’ young people aren’t in fact hard to reach through technology and social media. This is why we are working on an innovative, enterprising solution that can reach, inspire and support young people to progress and abstain from reoffending through enterprise, technology and a language they know very well”

 

For the past three months, The Small Business Consultancy (TSBC), a social enterprise which works with young offenders, gangs and young people with drug and alcohol problems has been been working on creating an innovative programme in response to the UK riots. Enterprise = Apps² (E=A²) is run over 5 weeks and will allow participating young people to find a gap in the app market, come up with an idea for a smartphone app to fill that gap, build the app on a rev-olutionary easy-to-use drag and drop and plug and play platform and finally launch the app on the AppStore, Blackberry App World etc. The platform is being developed by in partnership with TSBC by Aberdeen based tech entrepreneur Andrew Sage.

 

We’re in the midst of one of the biggest economic crises that our country has faced, our young people growing up in these troubled times have lost their access points to get information, ad-vice and guidance, with over 1 out of 3 of Connexions services now closed. This has a major impact on the work that Youth Offending Teams do with post 16 young offenders.

 

TSBC will be working in partnership with Youth Offending Teams in London and Leicestershire who have commissioned the organisation to provide enterprise based interventions to local young people between  October 2012 and February 2013 to trial this ground breaking pro-gramme with an official launch planned in March 2013.

 

TSBC will be approaching Research in Motion, manufacturers of the BlackBerry, Google UK, Ap-ple and Facebook  to fund and sponsor the trial and of the programme between February and October, and get their staff involved on the ground supporting and interacting with young peo-ple.

 

The main recommendations to businesses made by the Riots Panel, Chaired by Darra Singh, former Chief Executive of London Borough of Ealing in March 2012 were:

 

1.    Businesses should play their part in becoming business ambassadors for local schools and work with the public and voluntary sectors to promote youth unemployment in communities

 

2.    More businesses have to adopt a Corporate Social Responsibility strategy and commit to key initiatives including work placements and apprenticeship placements.

 

3.    The Government’s responsible capitalism work should make shareholder participating a pri-ority and to support businesses that take a socially responsible approach to business plan-ning.

 

Amar Lodhia said: “It is absolutely critical for businesses like Research in Motion who have been under growing pressure since the riots, to support initiatives like this where young people are encouraged to use their technology more responsibly. I was personally shocked that when I logged into the RIM website and typed ‘riots’ in the search bar, that nothing came up. I am hoping that these brands will work with our social enterprise to create positive social change”

 

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