Claudia Cahalane looks at the young ambassadors involved in some of Britain’s most innovative social enterprises, and checks out which subjects they liked at school

Gun crime – it’s one of the UK’s most worrying social problems. The challenge is to get those involved to realise it’s not cool and doesn’t earn you respect in the world. But how do you do that?

Sam Conniff, who set up socially-responsible marketing agency Livity at aged 25, has recently been involved in a project which should go some way towards ‘de-cooling’ guns.

His young team of employees has created the slogan ‘Trigger Happy? We ain’t laughin’ for Firetrap t-shirts on behalf of anti-gun crime organisation Trigger Change. The tees are now being worn on a number of famous chests, including the likes of Estelle, Lady Sovereign and Ace and Vis from 1Xtra.

The Livity team deliver one of their messages.

The project was ideal for Livity, the company Sam set up with his business partner Michelle six years ago. They employ a team of 100 young people whose thoughts and ideas are used by companies, organisations and the government when they need the perspective of young people for campaigns.

Love going to work

Sam says that unlike many of his friends, he loves going to work each day. He feels strongly that everyone and every business should think about being more socially responsible and not just be focused on making money to line their own pockets.

It’s because of his dedication to this stance, that he’s been chosen as one of the country’s social enterprise ambassadors. The ambassadors will spend the next three years giving talks to businesses and schools, mentoring people and writing blogs to spread the word on the benefits of ethical working.

They’ve been appointed by the government, which believes that a growing social enterprise movement will have huge benefits for society. “It is my hope that we are increasingly coming to accept that it is all of our responsibility to look after our society whether we do that through our individual efforts, or through our economic endeavours,” says Sam.

“And as enterprise and business is one of the key influences that can make a significant and lasting positive difference, a social enterprise is definitely the way we would advocate doing things,” he adds.

Sam didn’t go to university. Instead, he spent time trying out a mixture of jobs, from bar tender to window dresser, until he came up with the idea for Livity.

The other social enterprise ambassadors, which include Tim Campbell, who won the first series of The Apprentice, Emily Eavis of the Glastonbury Festival and Chris Allwood, who runs a new project called Auction My Stuff, had widely different experiences in their teens and early twenties.

A team member does some novel advertising for Auction My Stuff.

Craving mental stimulation

However each person’s life seems to be characterised by an inability to sit still, a need to be involved in lots of projects all the time to keep their mind stimulated.

As well as this, many of them, including Chris Allwood and Peter Holbrook, who runs the Sunlight Project in Kent, spent much of their university time setting up fair trade shops and charity events.

The youngest social enterprise ambassador, Matt Kepple, 24, set up his own charity fundraising project while he was a uni. It came about after he could no longer afford to make his monthly donation to sponsor a child in the third world.

He got some of his friends together to help him meet his monthly payment and soon got hundreds of people at Birmingham uni into doing the same. Now his company, Wahblo, has gone nationwide with many more students jointly supporting a variety of charity projects, from £1 a month. Matt is excited that his idea has been recognised by a number of high-profile companies, including Channel Four.

Matt Kepple engages the crowd at a university event.

Listen out

There are more than 50,000 social enterprises in the UK, so these ambassadors have done extremely well to be chosen. If you don’t recognise their names now, chances are you will be hearing lots more about them in the next few years.

Tim Campbell, who many people will know, left Alan Sugar’s company to set up his own social enterprise called the Bright Ideas Trust. Through the Trust, he gets big corporate companies to give him money to help young entrepreneurs set up their own businesses.

With other ambassadors, such as Penny Newman of Cafedirect and Sophi Tranchell of Divine Chocolate, you might recognise the company before the name. Both have been heavily instrumental in encouraging Britain to embrace fairtrade products.

If you want to know more about young people in social enterprise, see our education page, here