I'm the project director, so I'm responsible for all the work that we deliver with all
the staff and the volunteers. I also work directly with young people, supporting them
to improve their emotional health and well-being. I liaise with the agency.
I support young people to have a voice around health services and education,
especially emotional health and well-being.
We reckon that there are at least two in ten that at any one time will have an emotional health and well-being problem,
and those are the ones that we work with.
We have to measure our outcomes a base, so we know that the young people we're working with become less angry,
are happier, are better at problem solving, are more resilient.
So their emotional health and well-being does improve, but that has a dramatic impact or can have a dramatic impact on their life.
They get more friends, they become less socially isolated, some of them have not been attending school,
they have the confidence to go back at school and so their attainment rises,
and they have better family relationships.
There's one particularly that will always stick in my memory, which is one of the first young men that we worked with.
We started working with him when he was 16 and he was on an employment course and really wasn't doing so well.
We found out that he hadn't actually attended school since year nine.
He had had a horrific experience at home with an alcoholic mother who had then left the family.
He was the eldest of five siblings and the father expected him to stay at home after them.
He then moved in with his mother, went to a different school, couldn't manage it, wasn't at school.
So working with us he regained his confidence.
He then, with some other young people, did a project for us in a primary school
and realised that he actually really enjoyed working with children.
This gave him the motivation to actually study.
And with our support, he then managed to get a job in a school as an assistant.
So for being somebody that was dropping out of everything and was on a downward path, he became an employed young person
who was motivated and wanted his job.
