Young Innovators Showcase

Inverclyde’s Community Enterprise Project (EPIC) is a regeneration project that focuses on increasing the capacity of existing social enterprises and creating new social enterprises across Inverclyde.  The EPIC project is managed by CVS Inverclyde the local Third Sector Interface for Inverclyde.

As part of our commitment to evaluating the success of our projects we identified a need to focus on encouraging a social and entrepreneurial mindset at a much earlier stage of life helping to shape the social entrepreneurs of the future. Our experience identified gaps in key entrepreneurial and meta skills required for people to establish a successful social enterprise or business.

The EPIC Young Innovators Inverclyde programme empowered young people in developing businesses with a strong social mission.

Inverclyde has a growing number of young people who want to go straight into the workplace rather than further education (this has doubled for school leavers in 2024).  However, there are less jobs (around 2000 less jobs in Inverclyde in 2024). There is a recognised need for young people to begin to create their own employment.

Third sector organisations are struggling to recruit candidates for jobs in Inverclyde. Through this project we hoped to open employment pathways between schools and the third sector in Inverclyde to help provide more sustainable employment opportunities for young people who may struggle to sustain a positive outcome after they leave school.

CVS Inverclyde are proud to launch this video presentation about the Young Innovators project and highlight some incredible ideas that could bring a big difference to our community.