Name: Matt Stevenson-Dodd
Age: 34
Business: Unique Social Enterprises/Young Enterprise North West
Role: Founding manager/CEO
Where: Newark and Warrington

I always wanted to be a policeman when I grew up. When I was 18 I spent a year living and working in South America and it was then that I realised I wanted to do a job which would help people, rather than just working for somebody to make money.

At school, my favourite subjects were music and French. I went to uni in Stoke and took a degree in sociology, but I never felt it was entirely relevant to what I wanted to do. Seeing my older friends leave uni with no idea what they were going to do next made me think that I really ought to decide what I wanted to do in my life.

I had previously helped out at a small youth project, so I thought youth work might be a good potential career. I decided to find out whether I was cut out for it by volunteering at the roughest youth club I could find. I loved it and later enrolled on a postgraduate diploma in youth and community work in Plymouth.

My first job after graduating from that was in Newark and part of the job was working with the Newark Young People's Forum - they came up with the idea for the Unique Coffee Bar. In January 2000, I took a secondment from the youth service to manage the new coffee bar.

The idea was to provide somewhere that was just for young people, open 30 hours a week with free internet, low priced food and drink and access to a range of support services. Everything was going great until our grant started to run out in 2002. We realised we must look for alternative sources of funding.

How we started to support ourselves…

The local youth offending team asked us if we could provide basic skills education for eight young offenders who weren't accessing school. We created a new course for them, which worked really well. The schools were so impressed that they asked if they could buy more places.

Unique has grown considerably - in June 2005 we opened the Unique Scrap Store, an environmental re-use project which saves 50 tonnes of business waste from going to landfill annually. We also offer 25 work experience placements to young people each year.

Unique Scrap Store is also the first eCommerce Scrap Store in the country selling low cost, really useful play and art materials to teachers and arts workers across the country. And more Unique coffee shops are opening 

Other people seem bored with their job

I'm always trying to encourage other people to think about social enterprise as a career. Whenever anyone mentions a business idea they've had, I constantly find myself saying "that would make a great social enterprise!".

I often find that many people working in the private sector, and even the public sector, seem really unhappy in their jobs. When you talk to them about work they seem so disinterested. I love getting up for work every morning - that's one of the great things about running a social enterprise.

My advice to young people would be simply that social enterprise is a great career choice. If you want a job where you can use your entrepreneurial drive to really make a difference in your community then you should certainly consider starting, or working for, a social enterprise.

Any budding social entrepreneurs should to go to see a social enterprise in action, offer to volunteer for them and build up a relationship with the people who work there to learn the ins and outs of running such a thing.

After that, if there's a social or environmental issue which needs dealing with in your community and you've got a business idea and a market to support it - GO FOR IT!

http://www.youngenterprisenw.org/

click here to read Matt's blog