S.E.E.D.S. - Creative Self Employment a Piece of Stuff by ploota (jane curtis) While the latest Department of Social Security (aka Centrelink) "advancement" in addressing unemployment is conscripting people to Work For The Dole, a group of young people in Brisbane have come up with an idea of their own - an alternative model that gives participants choice, responsibility, skills and support. Not surprisingly it's a roaring success. S.E.E.D.S. is a community based Self Employment and Enterprise Development Scheme. Rosa Mauvra, one of the co-ordinators, tells us what SEEDS is all about... Basically SEEDS is a way for young people who have got really good ideas about becoming self sufficient and basically making their own income to give them a bit of a starting point. It's often really frustrating for young people who don't fit into the boxes that society likes to provide for them, especially like Social Security and the options that they give you when you're unemployed. A lot of people are really creative and they can do something with that. So it's an opportunity for those people who have got their "get up and go" to take it and run with it. Does SEEDS fill in a gap in Social Security's response to the possibilities of creative self employment? Yeah, there was a government scheme - the New Employment Incentive Scheme - but that's not existing anymore. The thing with that scheme was that they only took people if they were pretty much guaranteed of success anyway. They were really no risk for the government. Whereas SEEDS is much smaller and we can't offer the same kind of money as the government offers, but I guess it believes in you, you know - we didn't refuse anybody who applied and everyone who did the course just found so much direction for themselves. Even if they didn't end up doing what they originally thought they wanted to do, they actually found what they needed to do just through the process of it. And that's a success as far as the project is concerned. So SEEDS isn't just about people applying for a grant and you giving it to them, it's also about the process of gaining direction and skills? The course that was provided was an enterprise training course, but within that course, it wasn't just based on economics and finances and budgeting and all that sort of stuff, although obviously that was an important aspect of it as well. It was based on looking at personal issues and working together with other people and planning and time management and things like that that are really relevant and important as well. I think one of the things that made it more successful was because it did allow people to look at themselves and their own lives. It also recognised a lot of the difficulties that you come across when you go into business or you start an enterprise up. And it recognised the isolation that's involved. A lot of people take that on by themselves and they find it really really hard. There's lots of different aspects to that are really challenging for people, one of them being just the simple thing of motivation. And so this group was really supportive... it worked as a support group as well as being training. The people in the group built up quite a good relationship with each other and still are in contact with each other. It also required the people who participated to find themselves a mentor which is a really good way to get motivation and support from someone who's experienced. That was a really good aspect of it too, for people to get inspiration from someone they looked up to and respected. How did SEEDS come about? The reason the project ran was because we received a grant from the Brisbane City Council, but the reason we wrote the grant was because one of the aims of Connect Youth Action, which was the group that ran the project, was to look at creative solutions to local problems related to youth in society, and one of those obviously being unemployment. The people that wrote the grant were the people involved in Connect at the time, myself and Tim Kline. It seems like a better way to do what the government was doing, and more accessible. It came about a lot through Tim's work, he used to do Focus on Creative Employment courses which were basically young people, or it didn't have to be young people actually, but mostly it was, who had creative ideas and showing them how to make money from them. Because everyone was really successful in those courses, it was a good model to use. What appealed to you about making the grants a smaller amount like $500? Well, they were a lot more manageable for the young people to pay back. The way we actually work it is that we allowed the young people to come up with their own repayment schedule. So they looked at it and said "okay, this is how much money I need to borrow and this is how I can realistically pay it back". They were interest free, so that was a big positive for paying things back. But at the same time they could do it realistically, so if they thought $5 a week was the amount they could pay then that was it. A lot of the success of the course too was that the participants were actually given trust. They could handle responsibility and they were able and capable of coming up with solutions. What sort of projects did people use SEEDS to develop? An interesting variety actually. One of them was a graphic design business, someone had a worm farm, someone else originally wanted to sell natural therapies products but ended up deciding to go and do a course in Chinese medicine with a view to practising that and massage in the future and is really really going well with that. Another guy became a manager for booking gigs and organising other events. There was also an artist who wanted to work out how to make money from his art work and he's now going to college. He put together a folio, he's an amazing artist but he just really didn't believe in himself, enough to call himself an artist even, so he can do that now. And there was a couple of people who just needed to find their direction and weren't really sure... they had ideas, but they just found where they were at through the experience. That's a big variety. Yeah, it was really interesting, and the fact that one enterprise training course could actually cater for all those different things too was pretty excellent. Is this sort of project unique in Australia? In a way yeah. The enterprise trainer Sean Paris moved to Lismore and he was doing some stuff with the CES there. I think the CES there had taken on a bit the model of doing enterprise training. We've had a fair bit of interest from other places because it's been so successful. A lot of depends on who is running the training though. I think it's partly to do with the fact that Sean is so unique in his style. Where is SEEDS going from here? All the participants who did the first enterprise training course have finished that. They didn't want to all borrow money which was great, which means that there's money in the trust fund there available for the next lot. We're now just seeking funding to run the training again because we have to come up with a few thousand dollars to cover the training course again and also to pay someone to co-ordinate it. So we're really keen for sponsorship from who ever is interested in supporting it - it's an alternative to people being on Social Security and it works. The success rate was 100%. For more information about S.E.E.D.S., phone Rosa on (07) 3844 9237 Created on Tue, 27 Jan 1998 and last modified on Fri, 27 Feb 1998.

LOUDonline - http://www.loud.net.au - Wed, 8 Jul 1998