This year, we celebrate our 85th anniversary with new high-profile ambassadors and a range of activities for members, young people and supporters of NE Youth. The newly elected police and crime commissioner for Northumbria, Kim McGuinness, is NE Youth’s latest new ambassador along with ex Sunderland FC star Gary Bennett.

Fully supported by our President, His Grace the Duke of Northumberland, we have set a target to raise £85,000 to invest in Micro Grants, Social Action Projects and staff and volunteer training to support our work with young people across the region, with the theme of ‘Healthy and Happy’

We aim to achieve this with a range of Healthy and Happy charity challenges throughout 2020, including networking events, clay pigeon shoot, boxing dinner, Hadrian’s Wall walk, Great North Run and Swim, cocktail making fundraiser and the Kielder Run Bike Run challenge Click HERE to see our challenges!)

We believe being Happy and Healthy are both core elements to young people being able to live fulfilled lives. We want our young people and member organisations to think about the theme in a holistic way and believe that many proposed activities will be able to combine both health and happiness. We want projects and activities to think of health both

physically but also mental and emotional health and wellbeing.

View a video of NE Youth CEO Jon Niblo with Northumbria Police and Crime Commissioner, Kim McGuinness HERE

Read our full press release HERE

Jo Shallcross – 40 Day Challenge

In loving memory of 40 years service by John Shallcross OBE to NE Youth his daughter, Jo Shallcross completed 40 MILES EVERYDAY for 40 consecutive days by running & cycling.

John sadly passed away on 28th March 2020 with Coronavirus. John was a much valued board member who raised over 1 million pounds for the organisation during his 40 year time at NE Youth.

Jo raised an outstanding £21,000 for NE Youth. Funds raised will be directly used as part of the NE Youth 85th Healthy & Happy appeal to support disadvantaged Young People in the North East. Watch Jo’s Story HERE.

Micro Grants

We hope to create a small grants (up to £400) programme for young people to access along the following lines:

  • We will encourage, wherever possible, that micro grants are used on activities that will have a sustainable element e.g. trying a new sport, attending training, learning a new skill, the creation of a campaign.
  • Potential activities could include: mental health first aid training for a team of staff and volunteers; a programme of yoga instruction for a group of young people; resources needed to run a regular sporting or physical activity; development of a campaign of positive messages to share with other young people.

We would expect all successful projects to produce a short (1-2 minute) video of how the grants have made a difference and to provide a legacy of our 85th year.

Social Action

We want to be able to provide grants for social action projects to take place during our 85th year. We know that young people who feel connected to their communities through social action activities tend to be happier, have wider friendship groups and have increased resilience and skills. Providing activity budgets for social action projects to flourish in communities across our membership and the North East will provide opportunities to expand the impact of young people’s and our members’

work wider than their immediate projects or organisations and their existing beneficiaries. We are a UK Youth Achievements Award provider and will support members, who wish, to work through the accreditation with their young people.

Staff Development and Well-Being

In order to support our young people to be happy and healthy it is important that we don’t forget the workforce who are supporting them. We want to provide training bursaries for staff and volunteers to attend training we will provide which will support them to support young people. We envisage running workshops on topics such as young people’s mental health first aid and providing accessible physical health activities and will also run a consultation to see what is needed. We also know that the youth sector workforce is busier than ever and that this in of itself can cause stress. NE Youth will be undertaking a piece of work during our 85th year which will focus on our own staff’s welfare and wellbeing and we will make a commitment to share our learning from this process to inform our members’ practice.