It’s not very often that I directly promote something that I am up to on my blog.

However, today is different because what I’m about to tell you about matters.

Over the last year or so, a couple of colleagues and myself have been developing a thing called: The Bridge….a crowdsourced employment and careers resource that directly helps young people, help themselves get a job…..and today we’ve just launched a crowd funding proposal on Seedrs.com.

That doesn’t mean that we’ll be sitting on our laurels whilst we raise funding. We’ll be getting busy getting started and funding will help us run faster and help more young people sooner.

Overview of The Bridge

Here’s a video of me explaining more about the project:

The Bridge Seedrs crowdfunding pitch video from The Bridge on Vimeo.

Many of our young people are not being well prepared for their entry into the world of work. This is evidenced from employers who are now looking for more than just qualifications and are now looking for other skills like people, leadership, EQ not just IQ, team working and initiative etc.

“80 percent of success is just showing up” — Woody Allen

There are many Government, Private sector and Third sector initiatives that are trying to address these gaps. However, we believe that ‘initiative’ is one of the missing pieces in the employability puzzle and is one of the many reasons that are driving the current record levels of unemployment amongst young people, particularly in the UK (20% unemployment amongst 16-24 year olds).

In addition, we also know that roughly 75-80% of people find jobs via contacts, introductions or networking as opposed to through classified adverts.

The Bridge will combine these two things to help young people help themselves to find jobs and work opportunities. To kick start this we are going to take a group of young people and help them meet and interview a range of different professionals in different companies in different sectors and at different levels about their jobs and careers. These interviews will be captured on video and will then be freely available for others to watch and benefit from.

Each completed video would be edited and made available via a YouTube channel and our website, where they would be curated and edited as well as being supplemented by other relevant resources. Each video will provide a valuable training resource for other young people and schools.

We aim to build our interviews into a comprehensive library accessible to all. But, to grow our library, we will also crowdsource other videos from schools, colleges, universities and other organisations that work with the young and unemployed.

Whilst our videos will be free to access, we will earn revenue from the sale of a DIY interview manual to schools, colleges, universities and other groups that work with young people to support them in their video making; training courses; advertising & sponsorship; and the provision of reporting tools.

You can check out our funding page at Seedrs, our website at www.buildingthebridge.co.uk or our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/buildingthebridge to see some of the pilot videos that we have made.

In short, we would like to do to youth unemployment what TED.com and it’s TEDx format has done for the spread of ideas.

Now, here’s where I’d like your help:

1. We are trying to raise £50k in exchange for 20% equity via Seedrs.com. Now, if you are interested in helping us raise this money then head over to Seedrs.com, sign up as an investor (free), check out our proposal and make a pledge (Note: your pledge only becomes a commitment when we raise the whole £50k). If you do like the sound of the project but have some questions, want to know more detail or can help in some way then please get in touch with myself (Adrian) on +44 (0)7971 608821 or via email: adrian@buildingthebridge.co.uk; and
2. Please share this post with as many of your colleagues, contacts, friends and family as possible. I believe that with your help spreading the word, together we can make this work and help make a real difference to the lives of many young people.

Thank you for your attention and your help. We’ll let you know how we get on and we look forward to working with you to make a difference to the young people of today and their future employment prospects.

Finally, as Mr Seth Godin would encourage me to say:

I’m making this.
It’s scary.
It might not work.
What do you think?

Photo Credit: Sean MacEntee via Compfight cc