It was a pleasure for our staff and young people to attend an engaging and informative meeting, hosted by our friends at Reaching People, where we discussed how the community sector can better support young people.
All of those attending had a lot of face to face experience of working with young people across the city from a diverse variety of backgrounds. But the real experts on the day were the two young men, Delvin and Wahaj who attended. They shared
What we need help with is finding work and getting the skills and confidence to go for a good job
Young people often have no one to talk to so having a space where you can go and be listened to is really important
Lot of young people are isolated so having an opportunity to connect and make friends and connections is really important
Support young people speaking out and be creative
In discussion the community workers agreed with the young people and were keen to explore how we can work together to offer more joined up support to young people. All present recognised, young people often dealing with a complex range of issues and no one organisation has all the answers. Many face challenges winning funding to support this much needed work, but were determined to work together:
If we can work together without, ego, silo, or logo, we will be much stronger and better able to support the young people
Going forward connections made will be followed up on , for example Aaron from Leicestershire Cares will be seeing if he can run music/podcast workshops for some of the partners. Kieran , Sangeeta and Sarah the CEOs of Leicestershire Cares and Reaching People, will develop an action plan to enable both organisations to support this this “Joined Up” approach
It was a really useful meeting and looking forward to working together and making change happen”
More information
A talking head video of community workers from meeting sharing views on why the sector good at supporting young people https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5ghl8XSksI
More info on Reaching People https://www.reachingpeople.co.uk/
A video on Leicestershire Cares #PowerToChange approach https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFRlOLUhCmI