A culture of shared learning

The Fresh Start project offers us all, participants and project leaders alike, an opportunity to learn from each other and build our expertise and understanding. Good relationships are the key to effective learning and pave the way for new pathways to develop.

At the London launch event the project team were very impressed with the passion and commitment shown by potential participants. Many of them felt that this was a great opportunity to follow the dreams they once had and which they had had to shelve because of circumstances. They wanted to move on from just doing a job to pay the bills to a future where they could make use of their skills and creativity, forge a future career and contribute more to society.

This is, of course, one of the aims of Fresh Start , to help to build participants’ confidence as both people and entrepreneurs, resulting in both individual and societal benefits. We will try to do this by developing a shared culture of mutual shared learning and co creation of knowledge by making Fresh Start an enjoyable and inspiring experience for both participants and partners.

Through ongoing participatory action research we will be trying to capture the experience and learning resulting from the programme and share it with all our Fresh Start programme partners and the wider fresh Start projects. We are looking forward to learning from their stories and experiences also and in this way it is hoped that Fresh Start projects as a whole will be useful for similar programmes and policy makers. It is a great opportunity to make a in our thinking, in our policies and in our practice, led by the experiences, knowledge and aspirations of the participant entrepreneurs.