Jessica Carlye and Wayne Leask from OPEN Project recently completed the 6th cohort of The Circle Academy. Jessica won our pitch contest and receive £700 to go towards their project. OPEN is a peer education project currently operating under Voluntary Action Shetland. Our Academy team recently caught up with Jess and Wayne to hear more about OPEN and their experience on the programme.
Academy Team (A): Firstly, can you introduce yourselves and what you do?
Jessica Carlyle (J): I am Jess, and this is Wayne. I’m the Organisation Development Lead.
Wayne Leask (W): And I’m the Mentoring Project Coordinator and a Development Worker.
A: What does your organisation do?
J: OPEN is a youth organisation. We started out with our peer education, and we deliver issue-based workshops to all the secondary schools in Shetland. We run a volunteer peer mentoring project where we match a mentor and a mentee that probably share a similar life experience. They then work together to build the mentee’s confidence and support their goals. It is also quite valuable for the mentors because it gives them experience.
We also have our café project called Da Café. For 2 hours a week, we run a local café where young people aged 14-25 come along and just chill. We offer them £5 vouchers on arrival so they can get something to eat and drink. That’s run by our youth committee, made up of young people aged 16-25, supported by our Peer Researchers, Shannon and Akira. They have been researching everything that young people want and need out of the café space in our local area. The research aspect of this project is about to wrap up and now we are just pulling all the data together.
We plan to continue to do peer research on other topics though because we have seen the value it brings to our work. We also have our steering group, which is young people, aged 16-25, leading the way forward towards a fully independent youth-led OPEN. This year is all about training on leadership skills and figuring out what will be the right level of responsibility for the young people involved.
W: Yes. By the end of the year, we are hoping to put together all the intricate parts of the process of this transition. Like what is the best way or rather the least boring way to ask all the board-type questions, what are the expectations we have for the board members, etc? By the end of the year, we hope to have a constitution written. So that hopefully by next year we can progress into being fully independent!
A: How did you find the Academy programme during your cohort?
J: I think it was good. In general, online learning is very challenging for me. In the beginning, sometimes it was a bit overwhelming because I’m a discussion-based person so just seeing slides on the screen didn’t go into my brain very well. But during the second half, I found a lot of value in the sessions, especially because of the content and I felt more involved in it.
W: For me, I’ve done loads of different kinds of training courses so most of the stuff that was being talked about in the first two or so weeks was stuff that I was aware of. The second half of the programme was the most invaluable. The support from you guys has also been invaluable. It’s good to have people to support you when you need help.
A: Jess, how would you describe your experience participating in the pitch contest? How did it feel to win the pitch contest?
J: It was a good confidence boost! It was something I had never done before like I’ve done presentations and stuff, but I’ve never pitched an idea and had it be successful. But despite it being my first time doing something like this it felt really good to participate in the end. Overall, it was a good experience and I’m glad I did it!
A: How will the pitch fund benefit your organisation?
J: I brought it up with my steering group and we haven’t come to any final decisions on it yet. We discussed it, and everyone agreed that it’s going to go back into our young people, we just don’t know how it will be spent exactly. Because it’s £700, we might save it and try to get some more money to do something bigger with it, like getting some of our staff to visit the mainland for some training and development.
W: When we take our team members on these sorts of trips a lot of them are really engaged with it. A lot of them probably never left Shetland before so it’s a beneficial experience in and of itself. But we also found that when we take them out of the Shetland context to a new environment, they seem to form a really strong bond together that lasts years. So, it would be good if every time new people joined the team, we could take them away so they can really jell together – it’s amazing to see the difference!
A: How did you Wayne and the rest of your team react when they found out you won?
W: We were all over the place! Jess messaged us on the staff group chat, and everyone was just blowing up the chat. I felt ecstatic at the fact that Jess had won especially because it was her first time pitching. All our volunteers were loving the news as well. It was just a great feeling. Jess has done amazing!
A: Jess how did you prepare for the pitch?
J: I don’t really want to admit this, but I am so disorganised. But I did practice a bit the night before because I knew I wouldn’t have time to practice the day of. I also didn’t write a script; I just wrote down the key points that I wanted to talk about. Another thing I did was read the information you guys shared about the judges and I made sure to add some key points that I thought the judges would like to hear about our project and make sure that I’m selling it as well as I could. I feel like I was a bit unprepared but that’s normally how I feel whenever I present.
A: Did you find Mairi Damer’s sessions helpful in getting you ready for the contest?
J: Yes, I think she’s a really good facilitator. I’ve done different sessions with her in the past, but these sessions got me thinking more about how to pitch. Like I would’ve never thought to not start it off with ‘Hi, I’m Jess’. It also made me more conscious of the way I speak like starting sentences off with ‘so’ I was guilty of; it was really helpful! Also writing something out in that first session really helped me with how to go about it better. I don’t think I would’ve done it the same way had I not attended that session.
A: Knowing what you know now, is there anything you would’ve done differently before/during your pitch?
J: I would’ve liked to have time to practice it right before, but because of my circumstances at the time, I didn’t manage to do that.
A: Do you have any tips or advice you would like to share with future candidates of the Academy?
W: Use the Academy staff as much as possible! You guys have a lot of information and are unbelievably helpful! I know that I have underused you guys’ support but that’s just because I’m working on a lot of different bits and pieces but when I finally got my 1-to-1, that was great!
J: On the first week of 1-to-1s I booked myself in but for some reason, I thought I could only book one slot. But the second time around I tried to meet with as many people as possible and that was really helpful! Being able to speak about what we’ve got going on and get someone else’s perspective on it. I think that was really good!
A: If you hadn’t joined the Academy, where do you think you and your organisation would’ve been now?
W: That’s a good question. I think we would be in the same place we are now, but just without a business plan and the other documents we worked on.
J: Yeah, I think the Academy came at a good time! I don’t think I would have thought about business planning at all. And even thinking about stuff like legal structures. It got us thinking more. Now we might know what we want to do going forward. It made us think further and more about governance especially. For me personally, it came at the perfect time to help me learn more about organisational structures.
The Academy is The Circle’s online social entrepreneur training programme for those interested in running a ‘More Than Profit’ organisation. We take applications all year round, you can find out more about the programme over here.