Intro:
Orbiting 250 miles above, the space station provides us with the ultimate view of planet Earth. From this perspective, we ask our guests to engage with six questions that orbit around wonder and stories of hopefulness. For the next few minutes, this is our wonder space.

Steve:
Welcome to the ninety seventh episode of the wonder space podcast, which is a creative expression of a family trust called Panapur. My name is Steve Cole, and since September 2020, I have asked the same six questions to over 90 people from around the world. People like Marlon Parker from R Labs in Cape Town, who in episode two talked about their organizational innovations that have impacted over 15,000,000 people by creating environments of hope. For our third year, we are thrilled once again to be working with Ask Nature, who are a project of the Biomimicry Institute. Their work looks to nature for inspiration to solve design problems in a regenerative way.

Steve:
Here is another moment to help us re wonder.

Ask Nature:
Whether wolves in the wild or dogs in a park, canines have a remarkable ability to detect and follow smells. So what makes their sense of scents so much more powerful than ours? When they sniff, a bit of the air dogs take in enters a mazelike structure in their heads called the olfactory recess. Thanks to the extensive surface area this structure offers, dogs have more than half a billion cells available to detect scent, some 15 times what humans have. The part of the nervous system these cells send signals to, called the olfactory bulb, is three times the size of that in humans.

Ask Nature:
Another of their secrets is the sideways fold of the nostrils. So when a canine exhales, the air jets out to the side, drawing molecules from a wide area closer to its nose for its next scent sampling sniff. Humans have already adapted this technique to improve the effectiveness of odor detection machines. What other innovations might be in the air?

Steve:
This week on Wonder Space, we orbit with Prospect from South London. He is a self appointed ambassador for the youth of The United Kingdom, with a vision of bringing about a fairer and more progressive future for up and coming generations of young people. He is the CEO of Prospect Training and Prospect Living, who target financially excluded young people and provide them with employability skills and opportunities. Prospect also works alongside the Mayor City Hall and the Greater London Authority as a youth consultant as part of their crime reduction unit. With this expansive overview of Earth, I start by asking Prospect If we could do a fly past on any part of the world that is significant to you, which place, city, or country would it be, and why?

Prospect:
We are going straight to the island of Barbados today. Having been to the country myself, the energy, the vibe, the frequency of the country and of the people that are living there, I could actually sense a a a place of harmony for once while I was there. And I'm not sure whether that was just a whole the holiday phase, like, when you're in a honeymoon phase, if you're just some holiday enjoying yourself. But, genuinely, all of the people that I engaged with and interacted with were happy, empowered, and eager to, like, share with me their culture and teach me about themselves, which sometimes isn't always the case here in London. So I think in terms of Barbados, it's like it set a precedence for me to actually inner stand for myself that there is actually potential for there to be harmony on land where people are actually all happy, all thriving, and can all coexist together.

Prospect:
But as well as that, for such a small island, Barbados is actually making, like, very big shots and muse when it comes to regaining our independency and departing from that British monarchy. So for such, like, a independent and small country, just like myself, we are holding people to account and and through reprisal and and demand and actually getting justice for some of the reparations that we deserve. So just like how I, in my field of work, try to hold powers accountable to what they're supposed to be doing, I guess it stems from an empowerment in my con my home country of where that comes from. So, yeah, I say Barbados is my place, man.

Steve:
Prospect, give us a glimpse into your life story so far with an emphasis on what you're doing currently.

Prospect:
So my life so far, I described myself as a financially excluded young black man from South Norwood. Financially excluded, meaning I was excluded from opportunity, or intelligence information for how to educate myself financially, and I had to be quite independent in that sense. So I referred to my demographic as financially excluded. Who was trying to find a career relevant to my passion, I unveiled that there was something called discriminative hope, which is also hope in the form of opportunities that only actually makes its way back to certain people of certain demographics or certain colors or certain criterias. And this hope, this discriminative hope, that was in South Norwood excluded me and my friendship groups from, like, phrases there's more to life that people quite likely say to me as quite frankly, like, myself and my friends have been excluded from the more to life because we had no direction.

Prospect:
We wasn't shown anything we didn't know. The more to life to actually strive for. And because of that, we got distracted, and some of my friends I could see were falling into, like, condoning antisocial behavior, going to jail, people die, and trauma starts. And that for me wasn't wasn't really healthy. And I could kind of see because I kind of uncovered and unveiled the discriminative hope aspect, I kind of understood that it was only because the right opportunities weren't being marketed towards my friends and my friendship groups that the next steps and the consequences were happening as a result of this.

Prospect:
So self appointedly, when I when I understood this, I started representing young men and women of London, on a self appointed, position by governing authority and championing youth organizations on how to properly divert and, like, rehabilitate young people, but whilst also preparing the young men and women that I work with and my friendship groups, for the real world, like, through my own empowerment and employability course. So I made a course myself called prospect training, which is a short empowerment and employability course for young people, which focuses on goal setting and positive thinking. So I kind of just eradicate a lot of the negative mindsets that a lot of young people have in terms of the barriers to the success that they actually want. They feel like there's so many things holding them from getting there, whether it be their age, where they're from, how they talk, how they look. I kinda just try and get rid of that and and show through my story that you can be from this demographic and still be a a success as long as you just have a plan and you focus and you execute it.

Prospect:
And young people, youth, mentoring youth is something that we've found to be very, very engaging and effective. So especially through my position with I'm a youth consultant for the mayor of London currently, working with the violence reduction unit, and they focus on early engagement and early intervention programs. So this program is more early engagement, early intervention as if a young man knows that he wants to be a construction worker or an entrepreneur, he if we help him develop the right steps and uncover the right courses, he may need to take all the right information he can actually gather for himself. He won't find himself distracted or in front of a chicken shop or anywhere where he doesn't actually need to be because he knows that's not part of his plan. And I feel like that is more effective engagement and diversion rather than just, like, arresting young people who have been condoning criminal activity, not necessarily because they're criminals, but because they've not had anything better to do, which is a lot of the time the case.

Prospect:
So that's my that's my stance right now. And where I'm hoping to go with it is to grow my audience, grow my influence in terms of the young people that know me and my work, and then grow my infrastructure in terms of the partners that I work with so that I can get more partners on board with my community and trusted company that can offer me incentives and rewards for good behavior. My aspiration for this is to acquire a space that we can call home where I can facilitate my training sessions from the home where I can take young people to the safe environment irrespective of where they're from or what environments they're in and deliver in my safe space and bring them around other like minded individuals. With these organizations and partners that I wanna partner with, I need brands and organizations to to advertise this type of work and to say that this is actually the type of thing that we need and then to support it, not considering all of the time their profit margins, but more so the effect and the impact that it can have on the minds of of our upcoming generations.

Prospect:
And say, yeah, I can in fact sponsor this, and if I'm an influencer or a music artist myself, I can in fact come to that base that we call home and deliver the training and give like a little motivational speech to these young people and talk about how they can remain consistent and how they can get there. And based from that little strategy there, I'm also building a database which all local organizations, businesses can actually interact with this database and just for free, local opportunities that you have. This way when we interact with the young people through my training and uncover what it is that they wanna do with themselves, We then have a database full of local businesses and organizations who can offer opportunities relevant, and then we've also got the influences and the influences and the businesses to kind of reinforce to the young people that if you do this, we're in full support of it. I think that is the step by step process that I need to take, but that does start from just getting the space, I think, first and foremost.

Steve:
Where on earth is your place of reset or recharge?

Prospect:
For those who may not have gathered already, I'm actually quite motivated to do a lot of the work that I'm doing on a religious and spiritual, aspect. I believe everybody who's here has a divine purpose and a relevant skill set to match their purpose to execute it to a full potential, and the work that I feel like I've been sent here to do is by the most high. So I feel my most at peace and at reset and charging up when I'm in a church, and that's not not church necessarily. It's church service where everybody's there and we actually listen to the priest talking about me or my by myself in an empty church where I can just go in whatever state that I'm in, however I'm feeling, with all the poisons that the world attaches to me. I can actually go there and be freed of them.

Prospect:
I feel like I go there and cleanse. I feel like I go any negative in the field of work, especially that I'm in politics. Sometimes it gets political. You have opinions on people's actions, how they do what they do, why they do what they do, and sometimes that can fall under lust, envy, jealousy, or hate. And I find myself going to the place of worship to kind of cleanse myself of that.

Prospect:
I don't wanna be become people that I don't like or or respect, so I cleanse myself of all of that. I recharge. I get to remember why I do what I do and kind of feel safe. That's my place of reset and recharge, and I feel like it grounds me and keeps me focused and not distracted on on things that are worldly.

Steve:
What wonder of the natural world excites you the most?

Prospect:
I'm interested in seeing if I can go to a place of nature like Africa where nature and wildlife is is at its peak. I'm interested in seeing if I can develop bonds and relationships with animals and their natural habitats. Like, I've seen videos of a lot of people with, like, in-depth relationships with tigers and lions where they can sleep with them and stuff like that. I wanna see and meet these elephants. I wanna see and meet these monkeys.

Prospect:
I wanna see and meet these birds, and I wanna see what type of aura field I'm carrying, and uncover if I'm able to develop, similar to the videos that I've seen, a deep connection with the animals that God has put on this planet for us to actually be fascinated by.

Steve:
Prospect, what is your story of hopefulness that's not your own about a person, business, or nonprofit who doing amazing things for the world?

Prospect:
Yeah. I'm gonna I'm gonna talk about a recent one because I'm trying to we're moving forward with the time. Twenty twenty three New Year. We're not gonna hold on to just old work. And I'm gonna bring up a young man called Kian, who I've been working with alongside the Rio Ferdinand Foundation, big up mister Rio Ferdinand himself, investing into the futures of young men and women in the most deprived areas.

Prospect:
And they send me to Angeltown, Brixton and to Somerleaton, which is two areas in Brixton by police identified as crime hotspots in quotation marks where it all goes down pretty much. And it all goes down because of the reasons we was talking about earlier, lack of opportunity. Right? And what the Rio Ferdinand Foundation is doing at the moment is trying to first partner with organizations like Warner Music, KISS FM, and try and get not only market the opportunities that we already have using these platforms, but also get big organizations like Warner to come to estates like that and facilitate sessions like music sessions for any young people that wanna learn how to make a beat, make music. They can actually come to this session in their own community and learn from some of these big brands, which I think is a huge step towards healing our communities.

Prospect:
Right? Now this young man that I've met was was doing those sessions, Loughborough State, he was on, and he actually is around from that around that area. And he's 18 himself. And since meeting him, he just reminded me as of, like, a young version of myself. And even though I'm still young myself at 22, seeing a young man who looks like me is as eager to learn as I as I was and I still am and is really already making the steps, though, already started secluding himself from friendship groups that weren't beneficial to his life, already started to accept certain weaknesses in his traits and and begin self reflecting and working on them, things immaturity that you don't really come across very often.

Prospect:
And working with Kian to now see and uncovering, like, through the goal setting training that I've done with him, I've uncovered he wants to have a podcast and have a platform. He wants to help other young people to kind of get to that level of maturity that he's at, and he doesn't really understand how some of his generation isn't at kinda at that level of maturity yet. And we're and I'm talking to him saying, how can he grow in to to be an influence for his generation because he will be even more effective in his generation than even I will be. So for for me to first of all meet someone like that was empowering for me to understand why I'm doing my mission, what I'm doing is is actually working and effective. And it really reassured him.

Prospect:
It gave me energy to continue doing what I was doing and walking in my purpose. And for him to see and how he talks about how he appreciates this work and what he would be doing otherwise if this work wasn't available to him and saying these opportunities aren't freely available to the point where he actually didn't want to utilize our services because he thought it was too good to be true. He said, what's the catch? Like, what what do I sell my soul to you guys after this? Is done?

Prospect:
I'm saying no, bro. It's just this is what the kids in Kensington have standard. You're just from Loughborough Junction, bro. This is why you don't know about these types of things. So make sure you're utilizing these opportunities and grow with them.

Prospect:
And I literally just came off a email, with him where he's gonna be on board our next podcast, which will be done along Warner Music. And he's gonna be on there talking about opportunities, what opportunities should be available to young people in his local area, and what youth organizations could be doing better. So really turning young men and women from their communities to represent in their communities and their people, and I think that way is how we can really build community champions who can refer to us what their better community looks like. And I think that way is how we're we're really gonna heal communities properly. So he was a really great prime example to use, man.

Prospect:
Big up, Kian.

Steve:
Finally, as we prepare to reenter the Earth's atmosphere, what insight, wisdom, or question would you like to leave with us?

Prospect:
I would like to leave the listeners with this here. The year just recently started. You've been refilled after a draining 2022 with energy currency, right, that utilizing your 2022 experiences, you should choose to spend that energy currency very wisely this year on the things and the people that support you and what you love. Climb your god given ladder, then send it back down to lift people up in that order. Don't settle for anything less than an amazing 2023.

Prospect:
And that is my final message to all the beautiful listeners of today's show. Thank you very much for your time today as well, brother, man. It's been a pleasure.

Steve:
You can find out more about the work of prospect at prospectnation.co.uk and on Instagram at prospect living. What is your story of hopefulness that's not your own, about a person, business, or nonprofit who are doing amazing things for the world. We would love you to consider recording yourself in under thirty seconds, sharing your story on your phone through your video or the voice memo or recorder app. You can then simply upload the recording to the link on our website, ourwonder.space, and we will look to include them in future episodes. I want to thank Prospect for joining us on Wonderspace.

Steve:
Let's continue to share our stories of hopefulness that makes a name for someone else. We need them like never before. Thanks for listening.