2020 Nationals: The Journey of Enactus Sheffield




By Lydia Warden

Earlier this year, I was selected to be part of Enactus Sheffield’s National Expo presentation team. Taking place in April, the National Expo is a yearly competition in which Enactus teams from up and down the country come together to present their projects and compete for the trophy, with the winner progressing to the world competition. In order to progress to Nationals, you must first take part in the Regional competition, at which the 32 competing teams are selected. Both Regionals and Nationals presented an opportunity to present two of Enactus Sheffield’s projects (one of which was OnTarget) to a mixture of Enactus sponsor company employees and Enactus UK alumni.

On the 5th of March this year, myself and the rest of the team journeyed to Arla HQ in Leeds to take part in the regional competition. We delivered our 12 minute presentation before proceeding to Q&A. The judges took a great deal of interest in OnTarget and its potential to have a large and lasting impact on the young people we work with. It was so rewarding to receive so much praise for the project and the work we have put in to build it up to what it is.

We were delighted to hear that we would be progressing to Nationals at the ExCel in London on the 6th and 7th of April. However, as the country entered lockdown we were informed that this would be taking place online as the first ever virtual Nationals! We edited our script and accompanying presentation to allow us to record each of our sections separately, which were then transformed into a video presentation. We made it to the semi-finals of the competition, receiving much praise for our projects along the way. All in all it was an incredible experience and it was fantastic to showcase the work of our projects like OnTarget.

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