Bootstrap Campus connects young locals with Hackney’s creative economy

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Bootstrap’s rooftop terrace on Ashwin Street

“I was a little bit lost,” says Junior Machado. “I wanted to do something creative. But I didn’t know how to do it. I had no money coming in, my Mum told me to go to the job centre.”

Sitting outside a cafe with Machado, a Hackney resident for all but two of his 24 years, I wasn’t looking at a young man in need of a leg-up. He was focused, driven, with plenty to talk about. So what happened?

Machado went for a job interview at a company operating out of Bootstrap Company, a pioneering Dalston-based social enterprise that since the late 1970s has provided affordable workspace to local entrepreneurs and businesses.

He did not get the job but he did have a chance meeting with the enterprise coordinator of Bootstrap’s youth programme, Henry Trew, who invited him to join an event management training course called Bootstrap Live.

“I thought, this is the most interesting thing I’ve done all year and I couldn’t wait for Wednesday every week,” said Machado. “But in the back of my mind, I was thinking, how do I turn it into work?”

Young people into jobs

He was in the right place. Bootstrap Campus finds innovative ways to connect young people across the borough with local businesses, providing pathways into industries through work placements and employability training.

Bootstrap Campus operates under Henry Trew’s watchful eye. He describes his mission: “We want to connect this booming creative economy in Hackney with local young people. We want to create a structure where those young people can get the right skills to get into those jobs”.

“We bring young people out of the school or Job Centre”, he says, “We show them that this kind of place exists as an option. Teachers and schools do a great job, but they’re not really preparing young people with the full set of skills for 21st Century employability”

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One of the Bootstrap workshops

Inside the lofty Victorian buildings of the Print House on Ashwin Street, veteran social organisations and freelancers rub shoulders with almost three hundred individual enterprises. The Campus capitalises on the wealth of young, enterprising talent throughout Bootstrap’s buildings to show young people “a place exists, in their local area, where people run their own businesses”.

Before they could establish this connection, however, Trew and his CEO, Sara Turnbull, had to get their tenants onside. I meet Turnbull at Dalston Roof Park, owned and overseen by Bootstrap, a ready-made stage for the creative work of the company and its tenants. “We’ve worked hard on rediscovering the values of the organisation and re-imprinting them on people’s minds.”

Reaching un-networked

The Roof Park is bustling with a mid-week lunch crowd, most of whom Turnbull seems to recognise. “The building is a lot like an ecosystem”. She pauses to wave a hand at the groups sat around us, “here’s five hundred people who love what they do.”

It’s this spirit that Turnbull wants to bring to young people in the borough. “Creative careers have massive barriers to entry to people of any background, but particularly to people from poor or ‘un-networked backgrounds’”, she says. Reaching this group drives everything the Campus does.

Last summer, Henry oversaw the first ‘Enterprise Bootcamp’, a free training programme that took place in conjunction with local housing association Peabody Trust. Twelve young entrepreneurs with a business idea but no means to get it off the ground came to Bootstrap where they were offered weekly workshops and master classes from one of the enterprise’s tenants.

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A bootstrap campus workshop

At the end of the six-week course, they would present to a Dragon’s Den-style panel. Everyone who took the course came out with an accredited business management qualification.

For Trew the most satisfying part of the course was the issues the students chose to address. “Lots of them ended up having a real community aspect to their enterprise idea, like a football academy, or a video prospectus for young people going to University.”

The ‘Bootcamp Live’ workshops that Muchado took part in culminated in an event at the Roof Park run by a group of ten young Hackney residents and overseen by grassroots charity Lyrix Organix – now tenants in the building.

The next step along the way is to place their Bootcamp recruits into work placements with some of their tenants. Machado stayed on at Bootstrap to work throughout the summer with the Roof Park’s event team. He now works with the Young Londoners’ Participation Network and the GLA’s Peer Outreach team.

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Junior Machado, who now works for the GLA’s Peer Outreach team.

Machado’s story certainly seems to validate the Bootstrap Campus philosophy. The programme took a young, talented local, and gave him somewhere to start from. Now he is helping others to do the same. Machado smiled when he told me: “I don’t think any of this would’ve happened if I hadn’t come half an hour early and met Henry on the roof.”

It will be a few more years before the first “homegrown” social enterprise sets up shop in the Print House, but those connections are already being made, the structures are being put in place – and young local people like Machado are already reaping the rewards.