20 September 2022

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

EPIC Entrepreneur of the Year winners announced

Eight inspirational young entrepreneurs from across the UK have been announced as winners in the inaugural EPIC Future awards.  The awards were created to celebrate and acknowledge the achievements of young people who have faced adversity or disadvantages and gone on the succeed in starting their own business. The evening’s celebrations were a community-focused affair with winners and finalists joined by friends and family, other young entrepreneurs from the EPIC programme, local businesses, community supporters and sponsors, brought together at BGF’s offices in Birmingham with food provided by Harbourne restaurant, Holy Moly.

The winners were:

• Dom Kirsty from Evolved for Health Hero Award
• Sarj Dhillon from Guiding Light for Inclusion Champion Award
• Maddie Booth from Scrubbee for Sustainability Seeker Award
• Sofia Pellaschiar from My Self-Love Supply for Mental Health Award
• Chloe Latham from Listen Threads for Female Founder Award
• Cameron Esson from Boozy Ventures for Digital Disrupter Award
• Yuro Guo from Hey! Food is Ready for Community Impact Award
• Dakira Salim from Move on Time for Judges’ Special Recognition Award

EPIC Future, part of the Martin James Foundation, was conceived in 2018 by co-founders Jim and Ayyab Cockburn, and borne out of a passion and desire to empower entrepreneurial young people to realise their business dreams. Since the start, it’s purpose has to been to close the gap that can exist for some young people due to adverse life factors and provide them with real, meaningful opportunities and the chance to fulfil their potential.

Calum Sawford, COO of the Martin James Foundation and Programme Lead for EPIC, comments:

“The volume and quality of initial entries we had for the awards, was both humbling and overwhelming, so choosing the winners was a difficult task. But I would like to extend a massive congratulations to the winners and also the finalists.

The stories we read, of adversity and starting a business not only in the toughest of times when the world was in deep chaos from a pandemic, but also personal challenges the entrepreneurs faced themselves, ranging from mental health through to cancer, showed to us just how much resilience, passion and devotion, these young entrepreneurs have to make their dreams a reality.”

The EPIC Young Entrepreneur of the Year Awards were supported by a variety of businesses who also share EPIC’s passion and vision for creating a fairer and more equitable society. These included Power Medics, Antser, The APC, Hype Fitness, Triton Telecom, Mills & Reeve and Ormerod Rutter.

EPIC’s programme delivers real-world, hands-on support to young people wanting to, or are in the process of, starting their own business. Through a structured agenda, EPIC provides many resources including grant support to cover business start up costs, access to entrepreneurs, business mentoring, pastoral mentoring and coaching, specialist workshops and partnerships with other local organisations to enhance business networks and opportunities. To date, EPIC has helped more than 30 young people and will support 20 young entrepreneurs in the West Midlands alone this year.

EPIC is always on the look out for businesses and supporters to help with mentoring and fundraising, as well as applications from young people wishing to join the programme. If you would like to find out more about the programme, please email epicyoungbusiness@gmail.com

Notes to editors:

About EPIC:

EPIC is a business mentoring programme, engaging and enabling young people 16-25 years of age, who have experienced adversity and/or the care of a local authority, to create and launch their own company.

Young entrepreneurs are given 1-2-1 and group pastoral mentoring, focusing on self-esteem building through to skills based sessions on employability, and group ‘Masterclasses’, which focus on key business areas such as Business and Financial Planning, Marketing and Brand design alongside specialist topics such as Web Design. This is complimented with 1-2-1 business mentoring sourced from an additional pool of mentors across different industries within the Martin James Network, ensuring every young person within the EPIC Young Business Programme has a person centred, individualised plan with wrap around support. EPIC also provides financial support to cover business start-up costs.

Fearless Futures – Inspiring others to be bold, kind and courageous.

About The Martin James Foundation:

Established in 2018, the Martin James Foundation is a global network of organisations working in alternative care for children. We believe that children should grow up in families, not in orphanages, and we are working to deliver, empower and influence work to make this a reality. The Foundation includes independent fostering agencies in Australia, Canada, Japan and New Zealand (Key Assets), support to foster carers in the UK (FosterTalk), and projects that contribute to the global efforts in deinstitutionalisation.

For more information, please contact:

Kara Cousins-Kamari, Head of Communications 

Kara.CousinsKamari@martinjames.foundation

EPIC Future was conceived in 2018 and borne out of a passion and desire to empower entrepreneurial young people to realise their business dreams. Since the start, it’s purpose has to been to close the gap that can exist for some young people due to adverse life factors and provide them with real, meaningful opportunities and the chance to fulfil their potential.

Being part of the Martin James Foundation, the team already had a long and successful history of creating inclusive communities through the work with improving outcomes for young people and families globally. This experience, coupled with the desire to empower more young people utilising the business start-up expertise of its founders, and resources from across the Martin James Network, created the focus of EPIC to do something more locally and give back to the community in the West Midlands.

EPIC Future initially started via a partnership with the Birmingham Careleavers Association, as a place to refer young people to, who had a dream and the will to set up their own business. Funding was raised from a mixture of corporate sponsors and events, mentors were identified from leaders within the Martin James Network, and services allocated from the Network’s businesses as part of their CSR strategies. This approach enabled the team to provide young people with the incubation support they needed, ranging from legal advice to branding and budgeting.

Since then, the team has helped more than 30 young people to launch their business ideas. In addition to this, many more young people have been empowered with small grants during COVID, and to create educational content through a partnership with Beat Freeks. With the passion for continually enhancing the programme, in early 2022 the team structured the programme so it now provides three core aspects of support: skills masterclasses, which equip young people with the knowledge and information to be able to nurture and sustain their businesses; mentoring from a specialist who has experience and connections of working in a sector aligned with their business venture; and funding to help with initial start up essentials.

Ayyab and Jim Cockburn, co-founders of EPIC share their thoughts about what inspired them to start EPIC.

“In the work that we do as part of the Martin James Foundation, we have seen how crucial supportive community structures are, whether they’re familial, workplace or societal, in all our lives, to help us grow, develop and thrive.

These support structures are particularly important when we are young and still exploring who we are and who we want to become. For some young people, however, it can be harder to realise their dreams and ambitions because those structures may have weakened along the way, giving rise to barriers both practical but also of the mindset.

That’s why we’re so proud of the work the team at EPIC delivers. We’ve received incredible support along our journey so far from individuals connected to the Network like Luke Mulekezi, who helped us get started and supported the initial cohort of young people, as well as the team responsible for the delivery of the programme consisting of Calum, Marc and Ade, who put all their passion, time and commitment into working with the entrepreneurs, building community partnerships so we may grow, and constantly refining the programme to make it impactful and meaningful.

As we grow and expand to empower more young people across the Midlands and throughout the UK, we remain steadfast in our vision that all young people, no matter their background and life experience, deserve a chance at entrepreneurialism and we need to create the support structures to enable this. Creating EPIC Futures for our generation and the ones to come, absolutely depends upon it!”

The inaugural EPIC awards are taking place on 15 September in Birmingham, UK. To learn more or purchase tickets, please visit the event page.