Create Your Future: blog by Dom
As Global Entrepreneurship Week 2010 kicks off, York is home to ‘Create Your Future’, an event celebrating the most successful and exciting creative talent from in and around the city.
The event’s home each year is the Hospitium, a decadent 14th Century venue overlooking the picturesque Museum Gardens with two floors incorporating large central rooms which are today, packed out with fantastic talent.
As a stall holder myself this year, I can appreciate the benefits of such an event and it is something that has brought me new business and the potential of lasting friendships for the last two years that I have been lucky enough to attend. Instantly accessible for current students, ambitious graduates and those looking for new opportunities, or to start their own unique venture, CYF is the ideal place to make contacts and share ideas.
Anyone coming in to the venue is instantly greeted with conversation and inquisitive individuals who, while having their own ventures are keen to help and support those new to networking and informal-yet-established gatherings like this. Set out so that those who are curious can travel around the room(s) in a circle looking at each business and examining their product, it’s the ideal chance for anyone to come in and see what York has to offer in terms of its creative community including multimedia agency Lazenby Brown, young creative support networks Business Link, NYBEP, custom guitar designer Ed Taylor and film professionals the likes of Digifish Media and Agathon Productions.
This year, there seems to be a strong focus on young businesses and it’s great to see them accessing the support offered by the likes of Creative, Higher, and IT & Digital York alongside the aforementioned. Businesses making particular waves this year include those at York St John’s University’s Phoenix Centre – web-design agency Snapshot Media hold a stall centre room on the bottom floor while Social Media Analystujeewa Alwis debuts his own unique software on floor two to the delight of many in need of new ways to access their online audience. Also representing the Phoenix are former English Heritage photographer-turned-freelancer Keith Findlater, Agathon and the ever-developing and popular Live&Love York magazine.
If anyone wanted to challenge the idea that York is not a creative hub that can provide opportunities within a range of our planet’s most “challenging” industries, then it is events like today that serve to provide strong evidence against the variety of government cuts going on around various aspiring cities nationally. Indeed, since York is in the middle of such a creative “boom” and is, in fact an area with an above average amount of prosperous businesses and employment, it would be nice to think that, with funding being completely cut for similar events in other areas as close as Hull, CYF could be a positive example promoting the benefits of networking and bringing together people within dynamic creative communities, with the right kind of exposure. Science City York’s, Kat Hetherington provides her thoughts on the day. “It’s great that events like these can take place in York,” she says. “It’s provided a great opportunity for me to meet like-minded people and I have really enjoyed it.”
As a testament to this, I myself run an alternative music publication dealing with genres as niche as goth and as popular as heavy metal and electronic music, but each year I am able to connect with businesses way outside of my target market and find a way, through conversation (and lots of tea plus sandwiches) to form a connection and a bond that allows me to support them in some ventures and them to aid me in others. I have come away from this year having had great chats with representatives from The Arts Barge (a community arts and music project in the city), Screen Yorkshire (a nationally recognised film and multimedia organisation) and York College to name a few. It goes to show you that nobody is out of place in this environment where everyone is on-hand to support each other and knock out the recession.
Dom Smith
Soundsphere magazine
