Member Article

Project crowdsources ideas to tackle youth unemployment in County Durham

A scheme to generate ideas that could help to combat youth unemployment in County Durham has been launched by two regional business groups.

The Federation of Small Business (FSB) in the North East and the County Durham Economic Partnership (CDEP) are looking to crowdsource ideas from businesses, young people, families and the public sector, on how youth unemployment in the area can be tackled.

The two organisations are using the Simpl platform to source ideas from across the community, until the end of September.

Voting on the ideas will then take place and those selected as the best will be developed into a plan at an event in October.

The FSB has looked at statistics which show the number of unemployed young people in County Durham stands at 3,415 (March 2014).

Of particular concern are the 1014 (March) young people that have been unemployed for over 12 months with a further 845 young people who are considered NEET.

Ted Salmon, FSB North East regional chairman, said: “Youth unemployment is a huge issue that the North East needs to get a grip on. Our challenge to everyone in the North East is to help us tackle this and help our fantastic young people get a real chance to fulfil their aspirations.

“The area needs to move beyond just the tried and tested and the usual suspects to find new ways of tackling this problem. We’d love to see ideas being submitted from businesses, parents, grandparents, families basically anyone that has an interest in this.

“This is why we’re using the Simpl platform to gather these ideas from anywhere in the world to help us tackle youth unemployment.

“By working with the County Durham Economic Partnership and others we can start to make a dent into the numbers to help more young people achieve their aspirations.”

Brian Tanner, chair of the County Durham Economic Partnership, said: “Employment, and particularly youth employment, is the top priority of the Partnership. County Durham faces very special difficulties due to its geography and population distribution.

“Hopefully the Simpl Challenge will inject fresh ideas that can be exploited to make a real difference to our objective of bringing down the present high level of youth unemployment.”

Those interested in submitting an idea should visit the project’s Simpl page here.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tom Keighley .