What is the vision of your organisation?
Our vision is to see a world in which young people are happy, safe and making a positive difference in their communities and the wider world.
Why has your organisation signed the ‘End Poverty Pledge’?
We want to be part of a community where everyone is seen, valued and their basic needs are met. We have signed the End Poverty Pledge as a sign of our commitment to a thriving community for local young people.
What examples can you give of your organisation putting the ‘End Poverty Pledge’ into practice?
We provide food and eat dinner with our young people 3 times a week. This helps families from a financial perspective, but it also helps to teach cooking skills and how to cook on a budget.
We run a cooking project called ‘Five a Day’ in our youth café each week, which aims to focus on healthy eating and teaching cooking skills.
We are able to provide foodbank vouchers, if families need access to emergency food support.
We support a Healthy Relationships pilot training programme in a local secondary school alongside Good Company, which came out of the East Surrey Poverty Truth Commission.
We focus on working with those in the 16+ group who experience barriers to work or further education.
We offer Maths and English functional skills tuition for free.
We partner with other organisations, such as CAP or Mole Valley Employment Hub to run money management/budgeting courses for young people.
We offer opportunities to young people, e.g. residential trips, expeditions and wild camping experiences, in order that everyone can access them and as an alternative to more expensive schemes such as the Duke of Edinburgh’s award.
Our work is driven by the needs of our young people and the local community, which includes collecting their feedback and using their voices to help shape the services that we offer.
We are commissioned by the NHS to offer counselling services as part of our mental health support work for young people.
We provide volunteering opportunities for young people to help with the youth groups, to help increase their confidence and experience.
One of our team served as a Civic Commissioner in the East Surrey Poverty Truth Commission and was able to learn about how local organisations could best support those in financial hardship in our local area.
What would you hope to be able to do more of in the longer term?
We will continue to roll out the Healthy Relationships training programme across Year 9 at our local secondary school.
We will attend an information and training session on ReferSurrey to see if we can sign up to increase signposting to other agencies in Surrey.
We are looking into working more closely with businesses to support them to employ young people who are vulnerable or not in employment, education or training (NEET) and broaden our work in this area.
We are aware of the poverty awareness training resources available from Good Company for our staff and volunteers.