Venture

The Venture Team

Fortrose Academy Venture

Fortrose Academy Venture was a social enterprise company set up by sixth year pupils at Fortrose Academy based up in the beautiful Highlands of Scotland.

Our mission was to make a positive impact for people through conversation and interaction. To bring people together, tackle loneliness and support people living with dementia.

Read all about their amazing achievement below from their MD Matthew Parkes

Venture

I (Matthew Parkes) was MD of the ‘Venture’ team made up of 12 S6 students that designed, manufactured and sold our ‘Past Times’ conversation game. We were participating in the Young Enterprise (YE) Company programme as a social enterprise. YE is essentially a programme run within schools to improve young people’s skills (enterprise, innovation, financial, confidence etc) by getting teams to setup/run their own company and create/sell a product.
Over 1,400 UK schools took part in our year.

The game ‘Past Times’ primarily focused on helping to bridge the gap between generations, helping to ease social isolation and spark conversation between people. Through a range of accessible discussion topics on the board including ‘Work & Career’, ‘School Days’ and ‘Film & TV’, the game evidently made interaction with older people and especially people we hadn’t met before, remarkably easy. The game came with a booklet with suggested questions for players if required, to get conversation flowing.

We also discovered its use with some people living with dementia, or who experience difficulty with their short-term memory – we found the game could help spark memories from people’s childhoods and enable them to reminisce. Helping to interact with family members more easily, when often it can be hard in such situations. Many of our team had experienced difficulties communicating with older relatives whether that be due to dementia or lack of connection between the generations. Being invited to many care homes, Highland Hospice, healthcare conferences and more, we found the game to be very versatile in its use, much to our satisfaction and surprise.

We partnered with BIC several times during the year; from meeting with board members to conduct market research, testing out product ideas at the games afternoon, the Christmas lunch where we played our game for the first time, running in the Inverness 5K in 2019 to raise over £550 for BIC, the intergenerational lunch in May I think, and in February when we brought the BBC news team along to film with us at the intergenerational games afternoon. That was a special highlight as the video on the BBC News website and across their Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, reached well over 360,000 views worldwide. We were very grateful for BIC’s interest and support throughout our YE experience and we hope it supported their efforts as a growing, local charity. The BBC online content helped us to sell copies of the game further afield, to Europe and North America.

Here is a link to the BBC News article/video – - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-scotland-47611147/students-create-board-game-to-tackle-elderly-loneliness

We started our company in September 2018 and from early-mid 2019 we were selling games to NHS hospital boards across Scotland and Parklands Care Homes. We won the Highland & Moray regional final in March 2019, progressing to represent the area at the Scottish final in June 2019 in Edinburgh, which we also won. We then travelled to London later in June 2019, where we were delighted to place 3rd representing Scotland – a significant achievement for a Scottish team. We won the most awards on the day, including the Disney sponsored ‘Creativity Award’. We thoroughly enjoyed our year and it was a fantastic experience to achieve so much in the competition and in many communities.