Esther Turns the Tables On Crime ; (1) Clarins Award Winner (2) Once Again You has Teamed Up with Clarins to Find the Most Dynamisante Woman of the Year. The Winner of the Pounds 30,000 Award, Esther O'callaghan, has Always Been Motivated by Music - and Her Charity Aims to Help Troubled Teens Tune Into the Same Inspiration

Mail on Sunday › May 31, 2005

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Summary

You're going to be hearing a lot more of Esther O'Callaghan. It's unlikely that her Manchester record store, Factory, will ever become a Body Shop-type global empire, but Esther, 25, has got more than a touch of the Anita Roddicks about her: savvy business sense, bubbling enthusiasm and an absolute determination to give something back to the community while running a profitable enterprise.

Esther already juggles running the city centre record shop and being a mum (to 14-month-old William) with a host of other activities. She is a national board member of the Big Lottery Fund, and chair of its Young People's Fund, which is responsible for handing out more than Pounds 200 million of funding (she saw the role advertised on the internet when researching how to apply for grants). She is a volunteer business mentor for the Prince's Trust, a founder member of Rainmakers, an organisation which provides grants to local women in the community, and vice-chair of Manchester's biggest grant-making body, the Community Foundation.

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Esther Turns the Tables On Crime ; (1) Clarins Award Winner (2) Once Again You has Teamed Up with Clarins to Find the Most Dynamisante Woman of the Year. The Winner of the Pounds 30,000 Award, Esther O'callaghan, has Always Been Motivated by Music - and Her Charity Aims to Help Troubled Teens Tune Into the Same Inspiration

But it's her Decks4Schools project which won over the judges of this year's Clarins Most Dynamisante Woman of the Year Award. Set up a couple of years ago, it provides troubled (or in trouble) teenagers with access to music learning through after-school workshops. We're not talking about sedate violin lessons or woodwind ensembles the eight-week courses teach DJ-ing skills and their offshoots, mixing, scratching, MC-ing and beatboxing, plus music technology, production and engineering. It's a novel and exciting choice for the...

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