Carnegie Young People Initiative

Young BME 14-25 are underrepresented in building and construction skills trade.

This project will focus on training, development and employment linked with ICT and design. It will promote young entrepreneurs amongst BME.

In addition, the project will empower, build confidence for young BME to face challenging opportunities and be involved in decision-making processes that affect their future.

a youth led project supporting and working with gay, lesbian, bisexual,transgender and questioning young people aged 13 -19 years – based in Ipswich and across Suffolk.

The future 1st project is part of the Birmingham community venture project, which serves Winson Green, an inner city area of Birmingham. The LEA regulates the project. The project is coordinated by a dedicated youth worker, who is employed full time, whilst the staff team is made up of youth, arts and crafts workers, with help from a personal advisor and a Learning Mentor. Two workers are employed for 24 hours per week and a third is employed as sessional worker.

What we do?

The main aim of future 1st is to reconnect disengaged young people aged 14-19 into Education, after exclusion. The project does this in three ways: Firstly we provide OCN accredited courses that operate over the academic year 24 hours per week. The course content focuses on:

1. Self awareness
2. Assertiveness

The Aims of the project are:
To dispel the myths and misconceptions of imprisonment.
To raise awareness among young people of the ultimate consequences of crime.
To discourage young people from making a mistake that could ruin their lives.
To encourage young people to take responsibility for their own actions.
To promote a safe and law abiding life style.

We are a thriving Youth Theatre with a regular membership of just over 50 young people in secondary education, targeting children from disadvantaged backgrouds where possible. We are staffed by volunteers and are just waiting to hear regarding charitable status. We are involved in education, aiming to give the members a wide experience of theatre skills over and above performance. We tackle pieces of theatre that will stretch the membership in terms of performance skills, but also encourage them to reflect on their lives and roles as citizens in the modern world.

This summer we are staging the musical KORCZAK by Nick Stimson and Chris Williams in St. Ives Cambridgeshire. It is based on the life of Janusz Korczak, a pioneer in the area of children’s voice and rights, and a revolutionary leader of an orphanage movement in wartime Poland, who was executed by the Nazis with about 200 children in the Death Camp of Treblinka. His story is extraordinary and the musical is stunning in its scope, both dramatically and musically. We feel honoured to be doing this in the 60th anniversary year. We have been given a grant of £5000 by Awards for All to stage the production in St. Ives.

Youth amongst black Africans & Minority Ethnic (BME)communities face various challenges owing to their circumstances. Low income and unemployment are common and bring other problems. These include alcohol and substance abuse, domestic strife, family breakdown, school dropout,unemployment and emotional stress. Parents often take major decisions affecting the whole family but do not involve their children. it is likely that the children as youth have problems of poor communication, lack of assertiveness,critical thinking,problem analsyis and indecisiveness. The real nature and magnitude is not known. Nor is there documented evidence which can enable community workers to intervene systematically.
This project is an action research proposal so that the nature,scope and magnitude of the problem is known and addressed.

With young people we wrote a Youth Questionnaire as part of the Parish Plan for a village near St Albans.
A student from Leeds University collated the data. We now have 4 actions in the Youth Section:
1. Provide pedestrian crossings and safe walkways on Colney Heath Lane and Smallford Lane.
2. Take measures to make young people feel safer in local parks, on the Alban Way and Roestock underpass.
3. Provide more youth facilities; internet cafe and bike track.
4. Provide information about setting up Youth Councils around the parish (x5?) and assist those who showed an interest in starting a youth council.

ESSA aims to be the representative body for secondary students in England. It will help empower students to take a more active involvement in decision making processes affecting their education and work to engage the most disenfrachised members of the school community for whom school is something to endure rather than enjoy.

ESSA will promote the fact that students are the key people in Education and that they should be consulted and involved in decision making issues from the outset, as outlined in Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

We have designed and sent out a magazine which reaches all of the young people we represent. It is called Youth Priorities and is filled with all of what has happened recently, and what is going to happen in the future. We have only made 1 issue so far, but we plan to release it termly.

This project aims to facilitate meaningful and active Citizenship and sustainable involvement in community action amongst young people. It encourages decision making at all levels, responsive to young people’s experiences and based on local realities.