City secures funding to develop enterprise skills in Central Asia
City succeeds with two British Council bids to advance young creative entrepreneurs
City’s Centre for Creativity in Professional Practice, in partnership with ChangeSchool, has been successful in not one, but two, bids to the British Council’s Creative Spark: Higher Education Enterprise Programme.
The programme is intended to support the creative economy across seven countries in Central Asia, South Caucasus and Ukraine in response to an underdeveloped creative sector and a demand for entrepreneurship training to support wealth and job creation as this short video outlines.
Skills development for young creative entrepreneurs
Dr Sara Jones, Senior Lecturer, Cass Business School, who led the funding bids, explained that the funding will be used to work with local partners in both Armenia and Kyrgyzstan to provide skills development for 500 students and young creative entrepreneurs in each country.
The training modules will be co-designed with ChangeSchool, our partner in the UK for these projects, as well as City’s partners in Armenia and Kyrgyzstan, to ensure they are appropriate to the local environment. ChangeSchool has extensive international experience, working with British universities, in developing entrepreneurial capacity overseas through its faculty development programmes.
The project will draw on Sara’s experience of leading the Boosting Resilience programme, which builds the capacity of a range of creative organisations across England including theatres, museums and civic organisations using funding from the Arts Council England.
Project will benefit from academic creative expertise
Creative Spark will also benefit from the Centre for Creativity’s experience of developing and delivering the interdisciplinary Masters in Innovation, Creativity and Leadership (MICL) which has been running since 2010.
Sara said she was looking forward to working on the project.
“I’m really excited to be using the experience we’ve gained from delivering the MICL, and more recently the Boosting Resilience project, in these new areas, and am very much looking forward to working with our new partners in Armenia and Kyrgyzstan.”
Neil Marshall from ChangeSchool echoed her comments.
“We knew that City has a world-class programme in enterprise and entrepreneurship, we are delighted that we are working together to transfer this learning and help build entrepreneurial capacity internationally.”