Young advisers gain life skills by helping to recruit adult mentors for their peers

Provider Family Action

Name Friendship Works Young People's Advisory Group

Children and young people who have experienced loss, separation or trauma often find it difficult to build new trusting relationships. Friendship Works creates and supports positive friendships between children and young people in need of support, such as young carers, and adult volunteer mentors.

The core philosophy of Friendship Works is that it is child-led. We wanted to hear from children and young people directly about what they wanted in a mentor and to give them a leading role in recruitment and in improving the service. Thanks to an initial grant of £10,000 from the Big Lottery Fund, the Young People's Advisory Group (YPAG) was established in the autumn of 2015 with a cohort of 15 young people aged from 10 to 18. The project continues to run due to the generosity of other supporters.

Members of YPAG attend the potential mentors' orientation events and subsequent training weekends. They give presentations sharing their own experiences as well as taking part in question and answer sessions where the volunteers can find out more about what is expected of them, what makes an ideal mentor and the "do's and don'ts". There is also the opportunity for volunteers to have one-on-one time with a young person for in-depth discussion.

After the event, young people have a debrief session with Friendship Works case workers where they give their views on the suitability of the potential volunteers. These opinions feed into the overall assessment of those candidates.

Between April 2016 and February 2017, members of YPAG attended 10 orientation events and five training weekends with 199 attendees; 49 of which completed their training and are now mentors.

YPAG was created to give the mentees ownership and responsibility for the service, ensuring they know they are heard and their opinions are valued. The group has helped to improve recruitment and raise the calibre of the mentors by providing a blueprint of the "ideal" mentor. Most importantly, by giving the young people a voice their self-esteem, confidence and assertiveness has grown. It has given them skills to articulate and communicate their views effectively and the confidence to speak in public.

Friendship Works is expanding - it has recently started working in Lambeth and other local authority areas are in the pipeline. With this expansion, the hope is to grow the YPAG project as the young people's input is essential to ensuring the service, and the volunteer mentors, are of the highest standard.

Dean Davis is a Friendship Works caseworker

More from www.family-action.org.uk/friendshipworks

My View

By Kieran Joseph, 18, London

I am a young carer and have had a mentor through Friendship Works for five years so when they asked me to join the Young People's Advisory Group (YPAG), I jumped at the chance.

I personally have got a lot from having a mentor and it feels good that I might have an impact on recruiting new mentors.

Young people are not often listened to, but in YPAG we have formulated what we want to say and at volunteer training we get to lead.

One of the main things I've got from being part of YPAG is confidence. I would never have been able to speak in front of 30-40 adults before. If I can speak in front of 40 people, speaking in front of two people at interview will be easy. I am now able to speak to people from all walks of life and feel confident that what I have to say is worthy.

YPAG has also given me transferrable skills I can use in the future. It has made me see that I can achieve whatever I want to with hard work. Before, I would limit my expectations and think that I wouldn't be accepted in the corporate world if I wanted to take that path, but now I realise that I can go into that world if I want to.