The upcoming event, Creative Juice: A Creative Entrepreneur Expo highlights and celebrates entrepreneurs in the creative field. The expo takes place tomorrow at the Pleasantville Community Centre, San Fernando.
The event is being put on by the Youth Can Create programme, as the final year project of Department of the Creative and Festival Arts (DCFA), UWI, St Augustine student Shedrack Worrell. He explained, “The Festival Project of the Bachelor of Arts in Carnival Studies requires students to develop and implement a programme based on a talent or skill which they possess which they feel needs to be shared with and will benefit a particular group or community.”
Worrell made the decision to focus on Event and Festival Management, as he felt this was the area where he had the most knowledge to contribute. “The programme is about teaching and imparting knowledge on a specific group in the field of events and festival management, creative planning and business for the arts by extension. In addition, it creates a practical experience as they will be planning, designing and running the expo.”
Worrell chose to work with six members of YOUSERVE, a youth ministry group attached to the Our Lady of Perpetual Help RC Church in San Fernando. He said: “When I pitched the idea to the chairperson Lee Quan Chan, she immediately said this is something they need, because the group has events and activities that they throw as the ministry group for the parish and they really need to brush up on their creative skills and think differently and more creatively.”
Worrell said the expo is also based around creating a creative design experience for attendees. He added that this is an upcoming trend in marketing, which he learned about from his mentor Brendon Brathwaite of Buzz Concepts.
“Experience design means you don’t just come to the expo to watch the exhibitor and the items, but you engage with them. Our Expo has a theme, passion fuels the process, and using this theme we are encouraging our exhibitors to not only tell their story but to show their story and the process by which they convert their skills or talents to products or services.”
Other exhibitors will include Artspire Theatre Arts Company, spoken word artiste Kyle Hernandez, singer Dominique Friday, graphic design companies NZ Creations Graphic Design and Out the Box Designs, pannist Dike Samai, limbo dancers and others.
Worrell added: “Most importantly though we have a segment with creative entrepreneurs teaching the business aspect, so we have a financial advisor coming to advise the exhibitors, because creatives need to learn how to manage money and we need the basic tools to survive, especially as entrepreneurs. We also have a motivational speaker, a reputable creative entrepreneur in events and a group which does team building coming to do Business Development.”
Most of the exhibitors were hand-selected from Pleasantville and the surrounding communities and Worrell said this is an aspect he wants to build into the project when it is run again.
“I think moving forward we can really pull people from the community who have small businesses and who are creative entrepreneurs in some regard or are aspiring, where they could have a chance to meet the public and showcase themselves. I think it will be good for the neighbourhood to realise that you can make a living from being a creative, as people ultimately think that creative entrepreneurs are broke.
Creative entrepreneurs aren’t celebrated but as our theme says, passion is something that really plays a key role in the success of your business and is a continuation of your business. Something like this is needed to really bring awareness to Trinidad and to the communities that this is actually a job.”
• For more information, email youthcancreate@gmail.com, telephone 268-4463 and find Creative Juice - A Creative Entrepreneur Expo on Facebook. Admission is free.
