Why we do it

Youth unemployment on NSW’s Central Coast at 39.3 per cent, in outer western Melbourne at 41.1 per cent and in Adelaide’s west at 36.9 per cent.

There is a solution.

Align education with employment. Encourage enterprise and entrepreneurial skills in young people – things like creativity, self-motivation, healthy risk-taking, imagination, energy, enthusiasm ….

Create local places where enterprise skills are encouraged and developed.

Promote enterprise as a realistic option for some and enterprising skills as essential for all.

The best careers advice to give to the young is ‘Find out what you like doing best and get someone to pay you for doing it’.

(Katherine Whitehorn, b.1926, English journalist and writer, from
The Observer in 1975. The principle still applies today,
and to grown-up careers too.)

Specifically, the Chutzpah program aims to achieve the following outcomes for at-risk young people:

  1. Engage in meaningful experiential learning through a nationally recognised certificate.
  2. Build greater individual capacity to identify and make the most of opportunities.
  3. Increase self awareness, social skills, connectivity and creativity.
  4. Expand and broaden networks in the community, especially with local businesses.
  5. Improve financial independence both through the creation of enterprise and improved ability to gain employment.
  6. Skills and confidence building to start and operate a small enterprise.

70% of young people remain connected with the Chutzpah course in which they enrol (most have never previously completed a course).

Participants have positive outcomes across a broad range of measures.

And we also know that many reconnect with education as a result of discovering what it is they want to aim for.

Most young people say The Chutzpah Factory is their first positive learning experience!

 

 

Entrepreneurship, then, is more about the quality of experience in working life, a focus on exploration, creativity and personal achievement. People are often more likely to be involved in an economy that they feel they help to create through their daily work.

To be your own boss: enterprise and emancipation Tim Campbell and Shawnee B Keck