Students at All Saints

STUDENTS from a Salford college came up with their own enterprising plans after being given a unique insight into social businesses.

They developed a range of new ideas for social businesses locally, based around the environment, youth and sports facilities after spending the day finding out about social enterprise.

More than 150 Year 10 students at All Hallows Business and Enterprise College in Weaste took part in the ‘Enterprise Day’ sessions.

Amongst the businesses who took part was the Salford-based health and social care enterprise, Unlimited Potential; The Big Life Company; Emerge, PeoplesVoiceMedia; Contour Housing and Sound Communication.

The students were involved in a range of workshops and activities designed to give them experience of the world of work and develop their own entrepreneurial skills.

They found out how profits from the social businesses did not go to anonymous shareholders, but were ploughed back into the communities they served and business development.

The session was organised by Salford Business Education Partnership and Form Teacher Yasmin Hussain as part of a programme to develop work-related learning.

As part of its contribution, Sound Communication ran half a dozen workshops with the students, designed to help them write a newsworthy press release about the event for the local media.

Director Matt Finnegan said: “The teenagers were very quick to learn and enthusiastic – they understood very quickly how social enterprises differ from private companies or public sector organisations.

“And they came up with some cracking ideas of their own for social businesses in the area – it will be interesting to see how their ideas develop further.”

Vicky Winstanley, Enterprise Cordinator for Salford BEP, added: “It was a very successful day – both the school and I were very pleased with the event. We are extremely grateful to all of the social enterprises involved for giving up their time for free to help spread the word.”

A MANCHESTER social enterprise is to launch a ‘Green Pound’ to encourage business and the public to become more environmentally-friendly.

Twenty-two organisations, including the city’s Royal Exchange Theatre, have so far signed up to the scheme, which is being run in conjunction with Manchester Metropolitan University.

The Manchester Green Pound will enable private businesses and public sector organisations to reward and promote ‘green consumerism’ amongst their customers, staff and suppliers.

They will be able to purchase the Manchester Green Pound which can then be spent in any of the participating organisations.

Each participant has satisfied strict environmental criteria, developed by experts at MMU, to underline their commitment to the environment.

Five per cent of the cost of the scheme will be ploughed back into developing sustainable alternative energy sources.

The Manchester Green Pound, which is being developed by Junk Shop, a social enterprise in the city’s trendy Northern Quarter, is the first solely environmental initiative developed in the UK’s voucher business, which is worth a staggering £3billion every year.

Sound Communication is working with Junk Shop on promoting Manchester’s Green Pound.

To find out more about the scheme, go to Manchester Green Pound.

Read today’s coverage in the Manchester Evening News at  ‘Manchester’s launch of a green pound’

Oxfam choose Manchester’s Junk Shop for trendy new boutiques

SOUND Communication today proudly announces its (slightly intermittent) Annual Media Awards….

And already the nominations are flowing in.

Step forward the Manchester Evening News, the first print publication to win a prized gong.

For the most crass, offensive and distasteful contribution to the subject of mental health awareness, we have no hesitation in nominating the MEN’s Business Matters column of  Thursday 27th August 2009, written by Employment Law Consultant, Paul Davidge, for this shocking headline:

“Is the issue of mental health driving employers mad?”

Whilst this headline was, no doubt, the product of an exodus of journalistic sub-editing talent caused by the Guardian Media Group’s swingeing cuts, we do not think there is any excuse for this kind of glib, ignorant and insensitive description of an incredibly serious subject.

It’s not funny. And it’s not clever.

We hope the writer, Mr Davidge dissassociates himself from this kind of drivel. Perhaps he should seek a public apology?

The Manchester Evening News – once one of Britain’s great regional newspapers – should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.

• Interestingly, the on-line version of the column does not contain the offending headline. Thankfully.

SHADOW Home Secretary Chris Grayling has been rightly castigated for his intemperate remarks which compared Liverpool and Manchester with the American city of Baltimore depicted in TV’s cult series, The Wire.

Grayling suggested that the level of lawlessness in the two Northern cities was comparable to the fictional bloody, drug-ridden slums of the US city.

Although it may suit Grayling’s political purposes – and attract easy media headlines – to launch such an outburst, it is so way off-beam as to be faintly ridiculous.

So we shall move on.

However, one aspect of The Wire, currently showing on BBC2, which does stand comparison is in its depiction of the current state of  the media.

The fictional Baltimore Sun is closing offices, losing gifted, connected staff and missing important stories as the money men in charge grapple with the onset of the internet.

Swap Baltimore for Bury, Birmingham, or Basildon and the story is the same. Same pressures, same environment, same profane language.

The Wire’s depiction of frustrated but ambitious reporters itching to get out, supine management, declining editorial standards and a supremely cynical City editor, Gus Haynes (pictured above) is strikingly authentic – even for Britain.

As one senior North West journalist commented the other day: “It’s so accurate, it’s almost uncanny. Completely spot on.”

So if you want to find out what life is really like on your local newspaper, tune into The Wire next Monday night. You won’t regret it.

IS the BBC in favour of unfair trade?

That’s the question after the Corporation forced newscaster George Alagiah to quit as patron of the Fairtrade Foundation, a registered charity.

Seems the Beeb thought there would be some conflict of interest because Alagiah, who is unpaid and who was approved as a Patron in 2002, is due to front a programme on food later this year.

The Fairtrade Foundation, of course, helps producers in developing countries to win a fair price for their work – rather than being routinely exploited by corporate conglomerates. More on The BBC blunders over George Alagiah and the Fairtrade Foundation

THE presses will roll for the last time at the Liverpool Echo on Saturday morning as printing is transferred 40 miles outside the city, to Oldham.

More than 100 jobs have been axed in the cost-cutting move by owners Trinity Mirror, which on Thursday announced half-year profits of £49.1million.

The closure of the Old Hall Street plant brings to an end 154 years of printing in Liverpool.

Both the Liverpool Echo and its stable-mate, the Daily Post will now be printed on presses at Trinity Mirror’s huge plant at Hollinwood Drive in Chadderton, Oldham, in Greater Manchester.

Trinity, publishers of the Daily Mirror, say that the move out of Liverpool will mean “a better, brighter Echo for readers and better long-term prospects for the staff and the business.”

But union leaders accuse the Echo of “hypocrisy” and say it is betraying Liverpool by taking jobs out of the city and harming the Merseyside community which the paper serves. More on 100 jobs axed as Liverpool Echo moves printing to Oldham

CONGRATULATIONS  to journalists at Trinity Mirror in the Midlands for averting threatened compulsory redundancies at their newspapers.

The threat of a one-day strike by journalists this Thursday, seems to have brought Trinity bosses to their senses.

The strike has now been called off after Trinity, publishers of the Daily Mirror, agreed to withdraw compulsory job losses in an effort to maintain the company’s massive profits.

But the closure of a series of Trinity weekly titles in the Midlands has still gone ahead -  just like at other Trinity regional and local newspapers nationwide.

The Birmingham victory is a small but important step forward in the campaign to stand up for local newspapers, which are often the lifeblood of local communities.

Unfortunately, we cannot find any report of the NUJ’s victory in the Trinity titles, the Birmingham Post and Mail.

However, it is to be hoped that the news that  job losses are not inevitable in the recession will spread further afield and help encourage other union members to unite and campaign against the cuts in local newspapers.

Meanwhile in Liverpool, Trinity Mirror will next week switch daily printing of the Liverpool Daily Post and Echo from the city, along the M62 and past the centre of Manchester to Oldham, as another cost-cutting measure in a series which have already included job losses, pay freezes and newspaper closures on Merseyside.

• Trinity Mirror made a £196million profit in 2007 and  has paid out £520million to shareholders in the last ten years.

EVER wondered how the giant corporate Public Relations and advertising agencies win business?

Now you can get a valuable comedy insight, courtesy of YouTube (or ‘MyTube’ as perhaps it should now become known).

Congratulations to Jon Mason, aka Jollywise, for his hysterical take on the corporate advertising world in ‘The Truth in Ad Sales’.

With almost half a million hits and hundreds of comments, it seems clear that for many the video has a certain authenticity.  Watch, recognise and cringe…

WARNING: NOT RECOMMENDED FOR THOSE OF A SENSITIVE DISPOSITION

The Truth in Ad Sales

A FASCINATING insight into the workings of Government is provided by the right-wing Spectator magazine in its blog ‘Coffee House’.

It tells how Cabinet Minister Ed Balls, a close confidante of Prime Minister Gordon Brown, rang up the magazine’s political editor, Fraser Nelson, to complain about an earlier article which had branded the Children’s Secretary “a liar”.

It is not for us to pronounce on the rights and wrongs of the complex dispute over debt between the pair. Readers can make up their own minds.

But it is quite astonishing that Labour’s Mr Balls, who is in charge of the nation’s schools after all, should take the time and trouble to phone up a Conservative journalist and angrily demand that a blog post be withdrawn. Allegedly.

More on It’s not the internet – its Balls!

A SALFORD social enterprise has become the first in the North West to win the prestigious Social Enterprise Mark.

The fair-trade style Mark has been awarded to Unlimited Potential, after it demonstrated that its work benefitted local people, rather than anonymous shareholders or owners.

Profits made by the company are used to tackle social or environmental issues in the city.

Unlimited Potential, which is one of Sound Communication’s clients, joins other ethical businesses, such as the Eden Project in Cornwall, in winning the new Social Enterprise Mark.

More on Salford’s Unlimited Potential first in North West to win Social Enterprise Mark