“Helping Young People Help Each Other to Lead Their Communities”

VANEL are delighted to announce the approval of our most recent Big Lottery funded Reaching Communities project.

The project is currently known as “Helping Young People Help Each Other to Lead Their Communities” and is designed to build upon our positive experience of helping young people to choose to work with voluntary and community groups. Building upon our theme of helping communities to help themselves, we are working with young graduates and university students to support research work of value to our members and to identify entrepreneurial young people with leadership potential.This project will involve a team of Youth Leadership Workers and Mentors inspiring, supporting and motivating young people to volunteer and get involved in community development work across the local area. Once young people are part of the project they then identify opportunities to become leaders in their local communities by: engaging other young people to be more involved in communities; becoming better integrated into existing community projects; developing new ideas for local groups.

This is a three-year programme and in the first year participants will be helping to design and support the delivery of bespoke training opportunities to develop a range of skillsets including  networking, communication, mentoring, research, and campaigning. They will set up links, liaise with and work alongside young people focus groups and organisations to identify young peoples, volunteers and other residents’ needs, in local communities. They will also undertake research and evaluation work and establish and enable development of a youth leadership group to influence the overall development of the programme including its promotion and sustainability.

We’ll keep you updated on news from the project on the VANEL website, via our social media channels and our e-bulletins and newsletters.

Both this Reaching Communities funded project and our Awards for All funded “Young Leaders Network” project share a new website at www.youngleadersmatter.org.uk where we have simple information about what is going on and how you can get involved.

We are currently recruiting for the first posts for this project.
Visit our Vacancies page here for full details of the roles.