Turning Hardship into Happiness: NE Youth’s Mission for a Brighter Summer

National World - LocalTV

NE Youth is aiming to raise £30,000 to give children facing poverty and mental health challenges in the North East, a summer filled with fun, friendship, food, and safety.

Transcript

00:00The amount of young people that we help is severely limited by some of the funding

00:05routes so what we want to do is open that up to everybody and by everybody we mean not just the

00:11people the young people covered by the free school meals the thresholds change all the

00:16time for that and they're quite difficult and if you're a pound over you won't get the funding

00:22so what we do is we create a program for everybody and we raise the money in order to do it that

00:29means that the people who are living in poverty and there's about 170 000 of those in the region

00:36are affected by this so they can come to our service during the summer and they can have food

00:42they can have fun they can make friends learn new skills and get out the house the median income

00:48in this country is about 36 000 pounds and the definition of poverty is 60 percent of that so

00:54around 22 000 pounds is what's considered a poverty salary and what's crucial about that statistic in

01:02terms of young people is that 70 percent of that number is from a working family so at least one

01:09parent from that household works so they're not considered by some of the funding that's available

01:15as living in poverty and they're the ones who are excluded we're devising this program to include them

01:22all summer a lot of the young people who come to the sessions don't have access to other opportunities

01:27as well so things again that some families might take for granted like a trip to the beach can be

01:33life-changing for some of the young people we support but again just having that peer support

01:38having that interaction and having those new experiences and being exposed to opportunities and

01:43new experiences again is life-changing so things like going to an activity park last year some of the

01:51young people had never ever been to a theme park we went to um flamingoland that was a new experience

01:57for a lot of the young people and again the enrichment that they can get from those opportunity

02:03is just invaluable also the groups coming together as well as a big thing so mixing with young people

02:09that they wouldn't necessarily mix with again they're building on the communication skills self-confidence

02:16networking feeling less less isolated because a lot of the young people as well sometimes these

02:23sessions are the only time that they leave the house and they interact with other young people

02:29apart from school if they do attend school which is a completely different setting

02:34so it's just critical that we're trying to give as many young people these positive

02:39informal and educational experiences as we possibly can we want to teach young people those skills

02:48poverty often means food poverty as well and whilst there's lots of really great organizations to help

02:53with that the cooking skills part of it's a way in the future to alleviate those issues

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