Profits from student-led Tycoon Enterprise Competition donated to local food distribution charity
For many years, our VI Form students have taken part in the Peter Jones Foundation’s Tycoon Enterprise Competition, which aims to encourage the nation’s budding entrepreneurs and help young people to develop core enterprise skills.
Students across the UK are given the opportunity to work in teams to develop and run a business through the support of the Foundation, which provides a good will loan of £3,000 to successful entries.
During the recent half term break, Carla, Lucy, and Issy visited FareShare, a food distribution charity to deliver their donation raised from last year’s Tycoon project. The trio presented a cheque for £750 to the Guildford depot, an amount which equates to 3,750 meals. In addition to their monetary donation, the girls dedicated two hours to volunteering, checking and packing bananas. Their hands-on efforts directly provided 684 meals to those in need. This combined contribution brought their total impact on local good causes to an impressive 4,434 meals. FareShare expressed their gratitude, praising the girls for their kindness and enthusiasm, and were delighted to have had the opportunity to meet them.
Carla, Lucy and Issy, have written an account of this experience:
We completed the young enterprise competition called Tycoon, where we created a personalised tote bag business called Llevarse. The competition spanned two consecutive quarters, and we achieved a profit of £887. We donated the majority of profits to FareShare, and we organised a visit to the charity to present the cheque, gain an insight into their operation and logistics and volunteered for an afternoon. Being part of this competition gave us an insight into how a business is ran from operations to marketing and to finance. We developed skills in managing the balance sheet, profit and loss, expenses and innovation. This experience has provided a good grounding in leading projects, managing a team and hitting deadlines.
After carrying out market research as to whether people would rather names or initials and what their colour preferences were, this allowed us to make more than 100 sales around our local community, selling at our school Christmas Fair, at breaktimes and lunchtimes, throughout the Prep school and in our local church. We took orders on the day and worked hard to produce the personalisation in a short space of time. We thoroughly enjoyed the process of become entrepreneurs and have learnt vital skills to carry forward.
