Lottery promises a brighter future for vulnerable youngsters

Area:

countries outside the UK
England

Programme:

Young People's Fund Grants to Organisations

Release date:

17 1 2007

Sir Clive Booth, Chairman of the Big Lottery Fund, said: “I am confident that today’s funding for nationally significant projects will make a huge difference to the lives of young people in England. We want these projects to help create a positive change to the public image of young people and allow issues faced by young people to be more widely understood by the general public.

“Since its launch in 2004, the Young People’s Fund has put young people at the heart of projects - they have come up with their own ideas and have been involved from start to finish. The groups that were awarded funding today do just that; they support the aspirations of young people, preparing them for their future and the challenges of life that lie ahead.”

Prevention is certainly better than cure, and working hard to tackle the escalating rates of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections amongst young people, The Terrence Higgins Trust will today receive £1,485,621 for its national peer-led Sex and Relationship Education (SRE) project.

The project, which consulted the views of over 100 young people, is designed to increase young people's knowledge about personal health and empower them to make informed and healthy decisions around sex and relationships. The Trust will recruit boards of youngsters across seven regions in England to establish and manage a grant programme to support SRE projects created by young people. Targeting those aged 13 to 18, the overall project will encourage the development of vital life skills and enable young people to create and manage their own projects.

Rod Watson, Deputy Head of Health Promotion, said: "Terrence Higgins Trust (THT) is delighted to receive this grant from the Big Lottery Fund.  Unprecedented levels of sexually transmitted infections amongst young people in the UK reflect the urgent need for new approaches in work around sex and relationships education. We are extremely pleased that the Big Lottery Fund is able to provide THT with such significant funding in this area.

“The grant will allow THT to deliver an innovative national project, giving young people the freedom to develop their own projects around sex and relationships issues in order to educate their peers, whilst also gaining a range of important vocational and life skills.”

Awarded £1,181,526 today for a youth project to develop skills, boost confidence and enhance career prospects, the National Trust will be launching a three strand vocational scheme to bring brighter prospects for disadvantaged young people. Initially, the youngsters will be involved in 'Team' a 12 week community project consisting of residentials and team building exercises, followed by 'Get Into' a two week taster session on a National Trust site. Finally the young people will be assigned a six to nine months vocational experience placement where they can learn and become confident in a given area of the National Trust's work.

Fiona Reynolds, Director-General, The National Trust, said: "The National Trust is delighted to receive this award. It will enable nearly 700 disadvantaged young people to receive valuable work experience and to be inspired by the special places we look after. The project, developed in partnership with The Prince's Trust, is a key part of our vision to a make volunteering with the National Trust more accessible for young people."

Budding young scribblers will soon get a chance to write their own story, thanks to an award of £900,500 to Children’s Express for a project to help disadvantaged youngsters to learn communication and life skills. The new project, ‘Learning Through Journalism’, will be offered to young people who are deaf, blind, or not in education, employment or training. The programme will enable youngsters to gain accreditation in communication, reporting and editing skills, create a finished piece of work for TV broadcast and produce a video or magazine for circulation among disadvantaged groups. There will also be opportunities for young people to achieve accredited qualifications as peer mentors on Children’s Express programmes.

Fiona Wyton, Director of Children’s Express, said: “The Big Lottery grant will enable us to expand significantly across England and involve many more young people in our exciting media and participation programmes.  We have over ten years experience of supporting young people to produce stories for publication and broadcast in the mainstream media and of bringing together young people from diverse backgrounds and experiences to raise their voices and have a say in their communities.

“We believe that our programmes should be available to a much larger group of children and young people, particularly those who are least likely to have a voice.  This is the opportunity we have been working towards and we are delighted with the grant because it gives us such a strong platform to support our development plan over the next three years.”

Final grants receiving funding today are: Church of England Children's Society with £1,305,078 for Leading Edge, a project to support the school progress of disadvantaged young groups including young carers; Kids Out, awarded £977,086 for a mobile multi-media outreach project for young people in rural and isolated areas in Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Cumbria and Surrey; and The Reading Agency for Libraries receiving  £575,000 to set up 20 Book Bars for youngsters across East Midlands, South West, South East and North West.

Further information

Big Lottery Fund Press Office: 020 7211 1888
Out of hours contact: 07867 500 572
Public Enquiries Line: 08454 102030
Textphone:  845 6021 659
Full details of the Big Lottery Fund programmes and grant awards are available on the website: www.biglotteryfund.org.uk

Notes to Editors

1. The Young People’s Fund in England was launched in September 2004. Funding from the Young People’s Fund open grants programme in England can be accessed through three specific strands: £10 million for applications from individuals, £40 million in grants to voluntary organisations/ partnerships, £27.6 million will go to national organisations for large projects.
2. The Big Lottery Fund's Board has agreed to allocate a further £100m to the extension of the Young People's Fund programme in England. The money will be allocated in 2006 following a paper to the Big Lottery Fund’s Board that develops the possible options for the extension. These options will be developed to reflect the learning from our current programmes and to compliment the messages of the DfES Youth Green Paper that is to be published soon.
3. The Young People’s Fund aims to put young people at the centre of creating, planning and delivering projects to achieve the following:
   • Being healthy: enjoying good physical and mental health and living a healthy lifestyle
   • Staying safe: being protected from harm and neglect and growing up able to look after   themselves
   • Enjoying and achieving getting the most out of life and developing the skills for adulthood
   • Making a positive contribution: to the community and society and not offending or behaving anti-socially
   • Economic wellbeing: overcoming disadvantages to achieve their full potential in life.
4. The success criteria for this programme include young people’s involvement at every stage of the project from start to finish and the project delivering on at least, two of the five Young People’s Fund programme aims. To be considered applicants will need to demonstrate how they intend to achieve both of these objectives.
5. Big Lottery Fund is the joint operating name of the New Opportunities Fund and the National Lottery Charities Board (which made grants under the name of the Community Fund). The Big Lottery Fund, launched on 1 June 2004, is distributing half of all National Lottery good cause funding across the UK.
6. The Big Lottery Fund is building on the experience and best practice of the merged bodies to simplify funding in those areas where they overlap and to ensure Lottery funding provides the best possible value for money. To date, the two merged Funds have committed more than £6 billion to initiatives with national, regional and local partners from the public, voluntary, charity and private sectors, with a particular focus on disadvantage.
7. The Grants to Organisations strand of the Young People’s Fund programme in England closed for applications on 14 July 2006. The last awards from the Grants to Organisations strand will be made in January 2007.

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