• Organisation: Young Gloucestershire
• Project name: Street-based youth work and community outreach in Tewkesbury district
• Priority Type: Empowering Local Communities
• Total Investment: 5000.00
• Awarded: 2020/2021, 2021/2022, 2022/2023, 2023/2024
• Location: Gloucester

About the project:

We aim to continue to develop and provide street-based youth-work in the district, that proved so successful during the first lockdowns, to ensure young people who are in need of support are identified and don't remain hidden.

This youth worker support will play an invaluable role in ensuring young people are not criminalised by making the wrong choices, are there to breakdown negative perceptions young people often have of their area and provide the individualised support different young people require.

This street-based youth work will help young people develop as individuals, inform them about opportunities for further education, support to find training and/or employment, and ensure that young people are guided into YG's other services including mental-health, drug and alcohol and NEET projects. We see this street-based youth work model as a hub of youth provision in the district that can feed young people into our core youth work programmes for longer-term support.

By building strong working relationships with young people is vital in order to gain the trust that can lead them onto a path of longer-term recovery through more specialised support, e.g. counselling. We envisage that our street-based youth-work will continue to work closely with the Police. Simultaneously and through outreach work across the district of Tewkesbury, we aim to scope and develop a strategic plan for the District that will increase youth provision in the District while providing ongoing support to the voluntary sector in the area to ensure communities are assisted to run safe youth provisions especially around safeguarding practices and the upskilling of volunteers.

Asset mapping will be very important for this project to understand what facilities are available in the area for young people already and building on some existing work, we will gather this, crucially, from young people's perspectives and not professionals or adults. This commitment to youth-work in Tewkesbury district will create opportunities for young people to become active citizens while ensuring young people's voices are heard and represented when decisions that impact their futures are made in the district.