The Prince's Trust

The Prince's Trust is a huge organisation dedicated to assisting young people in a number of ways. I met with Nina Prosser, Programme Executive - Awards and Business, to delve into their enterprise offerings.

The Prince's Trust has offered assistance to young entrepreneurs since 1983 including low interest loans and mentoring spread over 2 years. However the program underwent a revamp and was relaunched in 2009. The program now includes a staged approach in assisting young people and integrates into some of their other programs ie employment if business is not the chosen path of an applicant. Briefly the stages are:

Stage 1 - Eligibility checks.
The trust assists young people aged 18-30 who have a business idea they want help to explore, are unemployed or working less than 16 hours a week and live in England, Wales, or Northern Ireland.

Stage 2 - Intensive Training
A 4 day training course is conducted. This is not just on business but basic money matters and aims to give particpants enough information to decide if business is for them. Even if they decide it is not the training is designed to provide them with real world transferable skills as the core goal is assisting youth. Those that still want to start a business progress to the next stage.

Stage 3 - One on one
Coaching is used to consolidate the 4 days of training and assist the participants in defining what they want.

Stage 4 - Mentoring and other assistance
Experienced business mentors are now engaged to get the businesses up and running. Mentoring is 1 hour per month for the first year reducing for year 2 and sometimes year 3. Micro loans are available as well as a limited number of grants.

I am impressed with the staged approach whch enables the trust to filter and assist as many people as possible depending on their needs. Those who put in the work progress to receive more assistance.

The sheer scale of the organisation is amazing. There are around 7,000 volunteer mentors nation wide, over 6,000 participants progressed to stage 2 training with a positive intention to start a business and there are approximately 78,000 alumni. The mind boggles at the management implications.

The Prince's Trust recently pubished a book on making your business happen to reach out to even more young people and share the knowledge built up over the past 28 years. Nina kindly gave me a copy, it is full of no nonsense advice as well as examples of their successful graduates.



Again there was too much information to cover here and thanks so much to Nina and the Prince's Trust for their time. I will be visiting the Scottish Prince's Trust in the next couple of days. That's right, next stop Scotland...