The Blair Project: Driving diversity in STEM innovation at Circle Square
By Bruntwood SciTech
Trailblazing social enterprise The Blair Project is on a mission to pioneer green skills training and champion diversity in STEM. To achieve this, they required a deeply connected, collaborative workspace. By locating their operations at the Manchester Technology Centre within the Circle Square neighbourhood, they have embedded themselves directly into the heart of Manchester’s booming digital and tech cluster.
Discover how proximity to world-class institutions like Manchester Metropolitan University and the National Graphene Institute has fueled their phenomenal growth. See how this vibrant environment empowers them to inspire disadvantaged young people to pursue rewarding engineering careers by converting petrol go-karts into fully electric e-karts.
Learn more about their inclusive electric motorsport programmes at https://www.theblairproject.org/, or explore our dynamic digital tech community at Circle Square.
The Blair Project is a trailblazing social enterprise that uses the excitement and exhilaration of electric motorsport to inspire and enthuse disadvantaged young people to pursue rewarding careers in the digital, tech, and engineering sectors. I started The Blair Project when I was 18 years old to challenge the elitism of motorsport—to make it more diverse, affordable, accessible, and sustainable, so regardless of your race, gender, or background, anybody could take part.
And we knew that in order to do it, we had to create a motorsport series where we could create our own rules and play by our own game. And how we were looking to do that was around developing electric motorsports. So with ProtoEV, we get teams of young people to convert used petrol go-karts into fully electric e-karts that they get to test and race to see what's the fastest and the most energy efficient. And not just test and race, but learn about battery technologies, learn about telemetry systems where you capture data and use it to improve performance.
Coming to the Tech Centre was the best thing that we ever did for our organisation because it allowed us to be a part of the digital and tech cluster within Manchester. We're on the doors of places like MMU, we've got Manchester University, Graphene, who we're all working with on some of our projects. Being in an environment like Circle Square is really, really important because you can discuss your ideas with other innovators, techies, to take it to the next level.
The level of growth that we've achieved in the last 18 months has been absolutely phenomenal. It has been a lot of hard work because we are a small team, but we are now looking to expand. The bigger we grow our team, the more wider reach we'll be able to achieve and impact many, many more lives.