#MeWeZeN 'Believe' Movie Premiere

So, I attended my first movie premiere!

I can take none of the credit though. I was there representing this amazing non-profit organisation ZeN who was the sole financial backer to the movie. It was surreal.

Yes, I did see celebrities, but to be honest the people I took a coach down to Manchester who were part of ZeN were more celebrities to me anyway. They were people I celebrate.

They are a group of volunteers who come to meet every month to discuss different ways to help the communities. Whether it be a free coach trip to the seaside for the locals or an inspirational talk in Derby for the aspirational goal achiever. #MeWeZeN is the place to be.

Anyway, we rolled up on the green carpet just for you football fans out there, in our black and white kitted out uniform and had the paparazzi hunt us down (not quite -- but remember I am a creative writer) as we smile for the flashes of limelight.

Even though this was extremely fun, we all knew we were here to put our serious faces on and represent this amazing non-profit organisation ZeN, who is making an impact on the community by genuinely caring about others in a way that makes a difference. Volunteering time to help others realise their own power and to change the world one ZeN project at a time.

As the newest member of the team, as in literally joining the previous Friday, I fell in love with the concept instantaneously: 'Let's all motivate each other to be greater than we ever imagined because we believe we can do great things.' And on that note, the movie 'Believe' about Sir Matt Busby was pretty awesome too -- I highly recommend you go and watch it.

I am not a footy fan. I wear heels - fairly difficult to play football in - but I found out this was not a film about football necessarily but a film about the power of the mind. What you can achieve with the power of focus and sometimes someone taking a chance and believing in you.

That is ZeN.

Get involved like I did. If you know me and like me as a person then you will 100% like ZeN. I offer a friendship-back guarantee. It is a multicultural group who have diverse interests who just love to help others. Jump in.

www.zen411.co.uk   #MeWeZeN

And share the love!

Deborah Stevenson is Having a Pigeon Party With The Mouthy Poets and John Agard

You are all invited this Saturday.

This post is more that just an invite though, it is a review of Deborah Stevenson's new pamphlet called Pigeon Party. She is knows a thing or two about poetry as artistic director/founder of Mouthy Poets and Nottingham University lecturer of Creative Writing.

With all this credentials behind her maybe you would expect her poetry to be stiff and out of touch. Well, in that case you don't know Deborah. She is quite possibly the most animated academic that I know and her poetry reflects grime music, proper English values, Caribbean raves and her East London youth roots.

Deborah cannot be boxed and neither can her poetry, so I won't even try but I would describe reading Deborah's pamphlet as being as energy infused as her on the dance floor. Boy, that woman can dance. She has your brain also moving at pace, completely engrossed in emotive imagery and intensive, urban storytelling.

Quite the Pigeon Party indeed.

I loved the poem Bread Machine Teen. I felt connected to this poem, especially as she mentions the poem being inspired by schoolgirls on the 25 bus. I used to catch that same bus all of the time when I lived near Ilford, so the poem bought back memories of the unripe maturity of these young girls:

'I want a more African bottom.
That's what's missing.
A batty a baby could be propped up on.'

And contrasting that with Quality Street where we get a sense of her parent's heritage:

'Small metal buckets filled with chips proper. Hot and English. Windy cheese and onion cobs sea-wet and salt-dry. Tinned mushy pea sky...'

Her writing style is sophisticated beyond her years. I felt like reading Deborah's pamphlet allowed me to get to know her personal side deeper with Should You Raise Him in the Hood:

'My first son will have dreadlocks
the shade of wheat sheaves - 
stockier than his school blazer
by the time he is fourteen.'

Having worked with Deborah previously I am fully aware how she mulls over every word meticulously to create this uninhibited flow of imagination within the reader's mind. You need to buy and read her pamphlet over and over again to uncover the layers of her personality.

You can't get all of her from a 29 page pamphlet either, you need to see her perform her work. She brings her poetry to life with an expressive face, a captivating pitch, raw unfiltered passion for words and she does actual poems with dancing. Quite a talent!

So come and see her perform this Saturday and the team of Mouthy Poets that are more like a poetic army slowing taking over the world (we currently have taken over Germany with Loewenmouthy!)

We are at the Nottingham Playhouse all day so come and join in with the poetic madness. And make sure you tell Deborah a special thank you for being her bulldozer-self and setting up Mouthy Poets so the rest of us can blossom creatively and so we can have an opportunity to be in hushed silence listening to young people slowly blossom on stage in front of us.

The Next Business Generation Is Lean!

We fought over gut feelings or testing hypotheses.

We fought over harmful chemicals or natural products.

We fought over the failure of the BioCity cafe. 

This is a normal day at the Next Business Generation (#NBGNotts) programme where you put enough strong-minded entrepreneurs into a room, teach us about Lean Innovation principles and then let us batter out the conclusions in the form of disproving each other’s hypotheses, learning why people who bring in packed lunch sandwiches lie on Survey Monkey, and by combining our own experience and insight with learning about each other's market to see if that doesn't spark a new idea within us. 

With our office bases in the Lace Market, BioCity, CleanTech and MedTech buildings, the purpose of this programme is to create businesses that create more jobs in the sectors of digital sciences, clean technology and life science within Nottingham. It is run in conjunction with Denmark company Accelerace, who specialise in supporting innovative start-ups to succeed through Lean Innovation methods, and BioCity who is Nottingham’s success story within their sectors of business innovation and life sciences. 

“The best funded accelerator in the UK”, according to Toby Reid, the director of BioCity when describing this programme. It is also fully backed by the wonderful Nottingham Council, who also sent me on the Nottingham Roosevelt Travelling Scholarship only months earlier - thank you sincerely Nottingham for another wonderful opportunity! As Nick McDonald, a councillor who came in to discuss Nottingham Growth Plan, the initiative behind the programme, was clear in saying, growth in Nottingham is a priority. 

Nottingham right now has many opportunities. There are those in the creative sector with organisations like the Mouthy Poets and other initiatives in the Creative Quarter; the Nottingham Roosevelt Travelling Scholarship for under 30 year olds to pursue a project that benefits Nottingham in the USA for 3 months; and by having a clearly defined economic growth strategy with extensive support for new innovative start-up businesses. I am just plain fortunate that I happen to fit into all of the above categories then -- or even more fortunate that I am based in this vibrant and expansive city of Nottingham!

So, our kick off into the #NBGNotts programme was by a talk by Accelerace CEO, Peter Torstensen, who began sparking off our imaginations by explaining an experiment done on world-class athletes: it showed that 50% of them would take a pill which would kill them in 5 years if they would guarantee to win the Olympics in 4 years! He told us to metaphorically take that pill of this intense determination to succeed, but hopefully don't die.

He also gave us his impressive statistics of the start-up company survival rate being 94% when going through their rigorous start-up programme at Accelerace. BioCity has shown similarly impressive statistics of 91% survival rates of start-up businesses over 11 years. According to Start-Up Donut, there are statistical claims of more than half of the business in the UK failing their first year and 90% not even making two years. So, what is the difference between these innovative business being highly successful whilst in the UK tried and tested business are terribly failing? 

At this stage, I would say validating assumptions and learning.

The value of the #NBGNotts programme lies in a simple, yet, effective practical process called Lean Innovation that is used for innovative technology start-ups in Silicon Valley. Imagine bringing entrepreneurship under strict scientific ruling through rigorous experiments to be able to test and evaluate the validity of your idea before you steam ahead into investing, creating and prematurely expanding. Imagine finding the customer and letting them show you what is of most value before you define the product you create. Imagine learning all of this under one roof? Welcome to #NBGNotts!

Day two: we spent our day challenging each other as entrepreneurs to become rigorous scientists. As one of our dynamic speakers and coaches, Aamir Butt said, “We are learning the art of writing an hypotheses in the science of entrepreneurship.” We were presenting our ideas with the encouragement to change them completely once we get solid results that disprove our hypotheses, and were strongly advised to rip up our well written business plans as they are just words, not measurable and provable action. The coaches are so futuristic in their vision that they say business plans are archaic as they described successful entrepreneurs as being in a paradigm shift where quick cycles of failure and learning are the key.

It is such an innovative programme for the business world and it is right on our doorstep here in our city of Nottingham. On the Next Business Generation programme we are working with the most informed and talented coaches regarding this newly articulated, but tried and tested process of Lean Innovation.

So, I predict Nottingham may become the Silicon Valley of the UK. 

That is my hypothesis to be tested and falsified. 

(Note: Ok coaches, I know this hypothesis is not specific enough, numerical, actually written to be testable in a measurable, objective way ...but it is imagery for the purpose of this article so just this one time let me off!)