Enterprise4All

PRESS RELEASE

BUSINESS SUPPORT SPECIALISTS EMBRACE ‘SUPERDIVERSITY’

Leading specialists in the field of business support gathered at Preston North End’s Deepdale Stadium on Tuesday 5th May to consider how to improve the support they offer to black and minority ethnic enterprises. BME-led ventures now add £40 billion to the national economy each year and represent a full 10% of the country’s small and medium sized businesses.

A panel of experts spoke of the need to recognise cultural diversity as an asset to the North West regional economy because it enables people to share ideas and to combine their talents in new ways. They also emphasised the importance of supporting grass roots enterprise, which Professor Monder Ram, Head of Centre for Ethnic Minority Enterprise (CRÈME) at De Montfort University, Leicester described as a ‘ladder of opportunity’ for many people living within minority ethnic communities.

As one of the key speakers, Professor Ram introduced the conference to the idea of ‘superdiversity’ – a term he used to describe the increasing complexity of the British economy, which is now influenced and affected by many new and dynamic factors. As a consequence of increasing globalisation, the community make-up is even more diverse than in the past – not only in terms of ethnicity but also in terms of the skills, wealth and education of modern migrants. As a result, levels of awareness, exposure to enterprise culture and the support afforded to people varies enormously between communities, so there is a clear need for support providers to ensure that they adopt an all inclusive approach.

Successive speakers built upon the idea of superdiversity and the need to provide appropriate support to all those who need it, regardless of their ethnicity, age, gender or past experience. NWDA Strategy Manager Yvonne Sampson noted that support needed to be wider reaching without being restricted to very specific and separately defined groups such as ‘the young’, ‘the old’, and ‘minority ethnic communities.’

Dr Nighat Awan, Chair of the Ethnic Minority Business Forum emphasised the importance of bringing people together to ensure that their views are heard and noted that the EMBF provided an ideal vehicle for doing so. An entirely voluntary body, it gave people a real voice, she said and today, many important organisations listen carefully to what it has to say.

Enterprise4All’s Chief Executive, Ilyas Munshi then explained how E4All had changed in recent years to keep pace with the increasing diversity of the region. The company originally grew out of the Asian Business Federation, an organisation that now has more than 3,500 members across the North West, but E4All’s remit has broadened to encompass other under-represented groups including women, social enterprises, people with disabilities and the over 50s.

Within ethnic communities, he explained, the traditional stereotyping is changing and women in particular are now taking a much more proactive role in supporting the family, which is one of the reasons why support for female entrepreneurs has become E4All’s single fastest growing area of intensive business support provision.

The final speaker was Dr Sylvia Sham of the Wai Yin Chinese Women Society – a Manchester based social enterprise that has forged links with all kinds of local support organisations, public authorities and community groups and which has become a powerful force for promoting community cohesion. She noted that minority ethnic communities were often termed ‘hard to reach groups’ by local authorities and business support organisations but, in reality, they weren’t hard to reach at all; Wai Yin had proved that by approaching people in the right way and with the right kinds of support services, such groups could be reached, assisted and encouraged to play a vital role in community development.

After the presentations, around 80 delegates took part in discussions about possible ways of improving the support services that are available to BME businesses. The results were fed back to NWDA and Business Link facilitators and it is hoped that the findings will inform future business support policy.

Hosted by E4All, the conference was supported by Business Link North West and the Ethnic Minority Business Forum (EMBF NW), and funded by the North West Development Agency.

ENDS

Key notes from the conference:

• BME entrepreneurs traditionally focused on particular industries such as retail, textiles and catering but now the trend is to engage in a wider range of sectors such as pharmaceuticals, healthcare, IT and media. People from BME communities are therefore making a more widespread contribution to the economy. The tendency is away from ‘volume’ markets and towards greater value markets based on knowledge and skills. Education is therefore playing an increasingly important role in motivating and sustaining new enterprise.
• An important challenge is to maintain young people’s enthusiasm for enterprise; to ensure that education institutions promote self employment as an equally viable alternative to finding a job with an employer.
• Some businesses inevitably fail but society should not condemn those that have failed; entrepreneurs take risks in an effort to succeed – and success brings many important benefits for society. As a result of enterprise, employees earn salaries, develop new skills, build confidence and gain a greater understanding of people from other backgrounds. “We should see profit as a unit of community rather than merely as a unit of currency,” said Zulf Ali of the Kashmiri Youth Project (KYP.)
• BME entrepreneurs are actively creating new opportunities for their local communities and within wider society – through job creation, innovation and social enterprise.
• For business support professionals, the challenge is to look beyond ethnicity at the needs and demands that people have in common, whatever their background.