The thinking behind this post is that, purely and simply, at Gencia we have the skills and the desire to want to contribute to solving some of today’s problems. I grew up on a council estate in the seventies and in those days neither I nor any of my 14 year old friends went to the local park every night (or any night) and got smashed off our faces. No one ever got stabbed and certainly no one got shot. It was unheard of. The worst that could happen was that you’d get punched by someone you didn’t know outside a nightclub, but these days it seems you’ve just as much chance of being murdered!

It makes me want to weep. In fact I have seen CCTV footage of a brutal, random, unmotivated attack that did bring about the death of an innocent young man and a tear to my eye. I think we all have to make a contribution to trying to put things right or we may as well just give up this country because, if we don’t all work together to help give young people the guidance they need, then I think it’s going down the toilet. I make no apologies for saying that because I believe it to be true and that’s what we’re trying to put together right now at Gencia.

So who are we? We are Gencia, a full service marketing agency. When we describe ourselves in a single sentence we say “we empower our clients’ success by combining technology with creativity.” We have developed this way because my co-director Christina is a marketer and I’m a graphic designer, so we are both very visual people, but we are also both big fans of technology. It also so happens that we firmly believe that an agency needs a combination of creative and technical people to provide effective, 'joined up' marketing solutions in the 21st century.

Recently we've been looking at ways to use our skills to contribute more to the community. We were very lucky recently to be chosen by Liverpool Trading Standards to help them with a drink awareness campaign in the city centre. Not only was it a great success but it also gave us an equally great sense of achievement at the, albeit small, contribution we'd made as a company to helping inform young people about this issue. It also gave us the desire to want to do more and presently we are investing a lot of time and effort into developing new ideas and strategies to help implement some of the current Home Office directives promoting safety in the community.

We are all very much hoping that we can continue to make a contribution, however small, to making our streets safer and our young people more informed about their lifestyle choices. Wish us luck won't you. A good result will benefit us all.