Last week Hannah, our Lead Youth Worker and a Paediatric Haemoglobinopathies Clinical Nurse Specialist hosted our first Teen Social Day for Sickle Cell patients, giving them the opportunity to socialise and enjoy activities they wouldn’t normally get to do! It was a success and the young people really enjoyed it, thanks to Newcastle Hospital Charity for allowing us this opportunity! Now onto planning our next one! 

Whilst in North Ormesby Youth Club, 8 young people engaged throughout the 7 weeks of this junior campaigner’s project. The first few weeks of the project, I was introducing myself and the project with the young people and finding out what they were passionate about helping to change in their local area. The young people were torn between helping people with mental health issues and creating wellbeing packs for them but not knowing where to give them to, and they were wanting to help people who are homeless, creating packs for them and donating them to a homeless shelter in Middlesbrough town.

The young people then decided their passion was to help the homeless and we thought about what we would like do to do tackle this. Over the next week we designed a poster which would be put around Middlesbrough and North Ormesby and got this to the standard we would like it, on this week also we created a list of the things we would like to put in the packs for the homeless. The young people decided they wanted, hand warmers, gloves, socks, blankets, toothbrush and toothpaste, deodorant, wipes and a refillable water bottle, lots of tinned food and sanitary items. The week after this we put all of the packs together and worked as a team to get 20 packs completed and made up ready for them to be delivered. Staff members went to Doorways in Middlesbrough town centre which is a homeless shelter, and delivered these packs and gave them some posters so that they could also advertise themselves.

We recruited 5 young people from the Redcar area who were interested in becoming young inspectors. All 5 of the young people met up with some Middlesbrough young people and they were trained up in a 3 hour session based on what a young inspector was and how to be a good one. The young people had chance to ask questions and engage with the young people who had done inspections in the past. The young people took part in some crucial team building activities which taught them about personal boundaries, professionalism and communication skills. Since taking part in our training, these young inspectors, inspected 7 organisations during the summer holidays funded by HAF. The young people reported that the training really helped them become the best young inspector and gave them skills they needed to pick up on different things in the organisations.

We are delighted to share the news that the two founding partners of the North East Youth Alliance, Youth Focus: North East and NEYouth, have been awarded two grants for an exciting new programme aiming to test whether providing centralised support to schools around enrichment has a positive impact on the quality and uptake of enrichment activities locally, without leading to additional costs/resources for schools.

The programme has been developed by NCS – National Citizen Service Trust and The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award and jointly funded by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and the Department for Education. North East Youth Alliance (NEYA) has been created to support the development and sustainability of the people and the organisations working to improve the lives of young people across the North East.Our ambition is to support a culture shift across the sector – to get people in the youth and community sector thinking and working differently. Through the Enrichment Partnerships Programme, our collaborative efforts aim to synergise resources and drive positive change within the educational landscape. This is thanks to two grant awards with the total exceeding £232,000. Youth Focus: North East will be focusing our efforts on Middlesbrough, aligning strategically with the Middlesbrough Youth Mutual, a local youth partnership.

If you are an enrichment provider working in Middlesbrough and would like to to get involved in this programme, please contact us!

#enrichment #pilot #youthstartshere