THE Platform Project’s new magazine will be a vlog, blog and Youtube presence called #iDare.

The title was carefully chosen.

“The whole focus is that it’s supposed to be quite daring,” said Sadie Sharp.

“It’s giving them a voice. ‘I dare to have an opinion. I dare to ask those difficult questions. I dare to look into those things. I dare to make a difference. I dare to stand up when nobody else will in terms of doing good things.’”

The Platform Project has been in operation for a couple of years, although its genesis came earlier in what Sadie says was a Eureka moment which had her leaping from her bed in the middle of the night and feverishly writing down ideas.

A successful management consultant with a degree in Law, Sadie grew up in Royal Wootton Bassett. She went freelance at 24.

“I had run several companies in my mid to late twenties. I was reaching thirty and I thought, ‘You know what? I’m a very boring person – all I do is work and there’s more to life than working.’ So that’s when I started to think about what was important to me. What do I really believe in.

“I realised I’d always had a penchant for helping out disadvantaged teens. My mum always used to take in waifs and strays when we were younger and I grew up with lots of random people in the house who always needed a bit of a hand up.

“I then started doing volunteering work with agencies like SMASH – youth mentoring with young people who need a bit of a role model.

“Part of the rationale when I was designing the project was that a lot of young people these days, even those who are doing well at school, have to make choices about career options – picking things like work experience.

“But they’ve never actually had experience of a range of different careers or had the opportunity to try their hand at them, to see whether they enjoy them, whether they’re any good.

“So a really key thing for us in the way that we run the project is that it’s diverse. It’s very project-based in the sense that the activities we do are very wide ranging. We are always learning.”

Individual projects vary, but all are geared toward helping participants discover and use their marketable skills.

An example is a project in which young people created and sold branded goods - anything from mugs to mobile phone covers.

“The skills they learned were things like marketing, digital sales for eBay, how to operate a printing press and those sorts of things, but essentially what they were really learning was how to have an idea and monetise it.

“All the things you learn as a potential entrepreneur are key high-level employability skills.

“We see it as a talent programme really.

“As much as we are targeting a lot of our activities with young people who haven’t had the opportunity to thrive with the mainstream and therefore have fewer options, actually it develops employability skills for all young people that they don’t necessarily get the opportunity to develop in mainstream options.

“Some young people just have very chaotic lives for whatever reason, whether it’s around family income or other social factors.

“But I think that for an increasing number of young people now, regardless of any of those ‘disadvantaged’ labels that are often bandied around, I think more and more are not necessarily fitting into the structure that mainstream education needs to operate in order to try to educate so many young people.

“They are working in classes of thirty, having a single-track learning programme – everybody has to be working at the same pace, in the same way, for the same topic for the same kind of exams and outcomes.

“We’re really trying to work with those who don’t fit, because I think that’s potential, not problem.”

The Platform Project always welcomes input from people able to volunteer their skills, their time or both, and who can offer guidance on anything from crafting to public relations.

The Platform Project’s website is www.platformproject.co.uk, and the organisation can be contacted on 0300 030 1232.