Bigger and better than ever, the additional funding that Make Your Mark with a Tenner has received from the Big Lottery Fund will enable 20,000 more students to take part in this years campaign bringing the total number of potential participants to an impressive 40,000! Tenners are being snapped up quickly and schools and colleges are urged to enrol their students before registration closes on 17 February 2010 by visiting www.enterpriseuk.org.uk/tenner. Organisations will receive £10 for each student registered, who will then have the month of March to turn their ideas into reality.
Funding from BIG will be used to extend Make Your Mark with a Tenner into areas of the UK where young people have little opportunity to gain experience in social enterprise. It will also help evaluate the impact of the ‘Make Your Mark’ experience on the participants and share learning with relevant national and local organisations such as enterprise and young people’s organisations.
Margaret Cooney, from the Big Lottery Fund, said: “BIG has a proud history of supporting projects for young people which give them the skills and ambition to make their lives better. This is a unique opportunity to get some real hands on experience of entrepreneurship with real money, and offers a chance for initiative and creativity to shine through.
“We want Make Your Mark with a Tenner to reach even more young people in the future and this investment will help Enterprise UK to build a solid foundation for the initiative to grow.”
The Make Your Mark with a Tenner ‘bank’ now stands at £400,000 thanks to the £200,000 funding that has already been donated by Dragon and Enterprise UK Chair Peter Jones and Bebo founders Michael and Xochi Birch..
Commenting on the grant Jones said: “A bigger Tenner bank is brilliant news as it enables thousands more young people across the UK to make their entrepreneurial ideas happen. We want to empower as many young people as possible to experience entrepreneurial success for themselves. More Tenners mean more young people will get the opportunity to show that age is no barrier to business success, as they use their own ideas to make money and make a difference.”
An incredible 97% of all tenners handed out last year were turned into profit and returned to the tenner ‘bank. Enterprise UK hopes for even greater results this year with twice the number of students participating in the campaign.
