Create 4,000 UK Young Leaders from Deprived Areas

With the support of GlobalGiving, our “Generation Change” project is enabling us to reach more young people via their schools and youth groups, and we already have some bookings for workshops during the Autumn Term.  

This slightly different approach is even more focussed on supporting the development of young people, particularly those who are disadvantaged or disaffected.  We are challenging the current narrative about young people, suggesting that they have fallen behind and will never catch up.  It completely misses the resilience and flexibility that young people have shown over the last year and ignores their real potential.  

We have consulted with teenagers, university students and people in their mid-twenties, from completely different settings and backgrounds about their experiences and feelings during and post ‘lockdown”.  This has given us the opportunity to develop a programme of workshops that will enable these young people to think more positively about their futures, appreciate the abilities they have, take pride in their achievements and consider different paths to success.  

A very powerful aspect of these workshops lies in them being developed and delivered by members of the PeaceJam UK and the PeaceJam Europe Youth Leadership Teams.  A small group of these two teams has worked hard on putting together some fun, interactive activities, and sets of questions that engage, enthuse and enable.  More members of these teams as well as some students from Bradford University have now been trained to deliver the workshops and the trial sessions have given us yet another indication of how successful this “near peer” experience can be.

At the moment the workshops are being delivered virtually using either Zoom or MS Teams, but it is hoped that we shall be able to visit schools from January 2022.  

We are working towards our target of training 60 mentors and reaching more than 4,000 young people over the next academic year.  We are extremely grateful for the donations that we receive through GlobalGiving that are allowing us to give more and more young people better futures for themselves and those around them.  Thank you so much for your generosity and support, and we look forward to sharing more updates during the year.