We’ve received a £308,038 National Lottery Grant

We’ve some wonderful news! We’ve recently received a three-year, £308,038 National Lottery Community Fund Grant to continue with our work.

We are so incredibly thankful to them for their continuation funding towards our Fun to Engage programme.

Four years ago, the Big Lottery supported us with a grant to develop our work and this new grant will allow us to sustain what has been started and, where possible, build on it further. We have loved being able to develop this programme over the past four years and look forward to seeing how it grows over the next three.

We hope to increase the number of volunteers we have, especially those who are from the local community, and help to support even more young people through our work. Our National Lottery Community Fund grant manager has been a wonderful source of encouragement and support with all the work that we do too.

Our Fun to Engage project provides safe spaces including open-access youth clubs, trips and residentials for young people, so they can socialise with each other, have new experiences and enjoy life.

It focuses on giving youngsters the opportunity to develop skills and overcome challenges through time limited projects in groups, as well as young leader and volunteering opportunities, with support from the projects’ workers within a group and on a one-to-one basis.

Daniel has been one young man who has really flourished through the Fun to Engage project. Four years ago, he was a shy 13-year-old who didn’t like to talk out loud. He was scared of being alone, worried about making mistakes and what people thought of him.

Our open-access clubs, trips and other projects have provided him with safe spaces to spend his time. They have also been a constant source of support and he has had encouragement from our youth workers, and he has had a chance to develop his social skills through interacting with his peers. He is now a confident and reliable 17-year-old, who is our most dedicated Young Leader.

This new tranche of funding will go towards staff salaries and other associated staffing costs including training, recruitment, as well as consultancy and advice, sessional workers, overheads, project work, running costs, travel, residentials, core costs and equipment for the young people we work with.