As part of the WA community, it’s incredibly important for me to keep an open mindset towards the world around me, as our school is so diverse. Another key skill in life is to be able to interact with different people and speak up about what you think. Fortunately, I have had a golden opportunity along with selected others to participate in the annual Unloc Young Entrepreneurs Competition. 

This event took place on Thursday 29th of June 2023 and required us to spend the whole day at the venue we were at. We were joined by a couple of other schools but it was a friendly event and thankfully, no harsh feelings were inflicted. Once we were seated, our host revealed the challenge to us, which was called ‘Reuse and Reduce’. Our job was to create a business idea to ensure the environment was spared any damage and to ensure that the customers were willing to cooperate with their subscription as well. We had a budget of £1000 - although unfortunately this was not real money! I particularly enjoyed the fact that everybody had jobs to do and nobody was left out. With everyone’s unique ideas, we managed to model our business ‘Composition’ and make it the best we could. To be successful, we had to demonstrate teamwork, communication, involvement, and enthusiasm towards the topic - which I think we all did very successfully!

To give a quick overview of our business idea, we decided to base our plan on compost. This is because we found out that electricity could be generated from food waste, so why not profit from this. We came up with a method that every week, we would rent a truck to collect parts of the compost so that we could dump it in the generator. 

Additionally, we were asked to put together a presentation for our ideas. During this time, we also managed to research quite a lot about sustainability so we also came out with knowledge which I think is very important. It was a tight competition as all the other schools also presented slides full of hard work. Though, I am delighted to say we managed to win an award - Overall Winner for Best Pitch!

Even though our idea could be improved, we are all tremendously pleased with the results and as we were also competing with people older than us, we are very proud of communicating our ideas. Overall, it was an honour being there representing Westminster Academy and we are very grateful for it. On behalf of everyone who went there, I thank Unloc for inviting us to this and I can’t wait to go to another one! 

Here is the link to Unloc’s website for more information: https://www.unloc.org.uk/