Last September, Emma Revie took over from Helen Marshall as chief executive of youth membership organisation Ambition, formerly Clubs for Young People. Revie comes from a sports and training background and is intent on taking forward collaboration across the sector.
What attracted you to the role?
A real passion for young people. I love working with them and find that in any situation when a young person's voice comes through things often become clearer because they speak a lot of sense.
What projects have you been working on in your first few months in post?
At our conference we had a discussion around creating a positive agenda for young people so we are continuing to do that with a view to feed back to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) early this year.
We have also been running a National Citizen Service (NCS) pathfinder programme with nine of our member organisations, which started on my second day in post.
We thought it would be easier for us to recruit to, but the pathfinder was focused on identifying those young people who might not otherwise have engaged with NCS. When you're working with communities that might previously not have wanted to engage that can be more challenging. But 210 [participants] was our target and we are certainly in that ball park.
In 2015, the Confederation of Heads of Young Peoples Services merged into Ambition and last year you took on the functions and members of the National Council for Voluntary Youth Services (NCVYS). Do you see Ambition as speaking for the whole youth sector?
Absolutely not. It would be disingenuous to say that. The range of challenges facing young people are complex and the expertise contained in all of the different organisations within and outside of our membership are incredible and we don't have any credibility to speak on behalf of the many areas that have more expertise.
What I have seen since taking on this role is that we are very experienced in collaborating with different organisations. I see that as our job. It is about reaching out and working with colleagues in other organisations that are doing incredible work for young people and have achieved such incredible things that we can learn from and contribute to.
Helen Marshall told CYP Now that she envisaged a future where public, voluntary and private providers work collaboratively to deliver services through partnerships - is this something you still want to pursue?
Absolutely. We have a combination of voluntary and community organisations and local authority members and what those members are doing is often engaging with private providers to come up with innovative and collaborative ways of delivering services.
I really picked up from our members that they are all about innovation and collaboration - finding a way through to deliver services they know are important to young people. What our members are good at, after coming through decades of challenges, is they can adapt the way of getting the right services to the right young people at the point of need.
How many members do you have?
Before we took on NCVYS members we had 80 members - now we have 150, which is a significant increase. For me, future targets are around the satisfaction of our members. My focus on a day-to-day basis is ensuring we have our offer for our members and can build their capacity.
In times of austerity it is about making sure there is no duplication of services and no working in isolation but instead reaching out and working collaboratively. It is about supporting our members to access funding but also other pots of cash that we may not have historically gone for. There are other sources of funding that our members are innovatively getting because of collaboration and we want to support them in securing that funding for the services they know young people need.
At the Ambition conference youth minister Rob Wilson announced that a new youth statement will be published in 2017 - what would you like it to say?
We were delighted about it - we have our sleeves firmly rolled up to engage with it.
What we would really like to see is a high-level strategy that really defines what high-quality local youth provision should look like and in particular the support the adolescent should be allowed to rely on locally.
We are also keen on exploring the system for assessing the quality of other local youth offers and in the settings where all of that is delivered.
We were also encouraged from the minister's recommendation for cross-departmental collaboration because we see that as central to delivering outstanding services.
Are you pleased that youth minister and youth policy moved from the Cabinet Office to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport?
I am grateful that we have the same minister. It means there is no starting again but instead gives some consistency which allows us now to have a conversation on youth policy. We also see the benefits of the link between youth social action and NCS and other programmes for young people that lie within DCMS.
Emma Revie CV
- September 2016 - present: chief executive, Ambition
- September 2010 - August 2016: chief executive, Reynolds Training Academy & Reynolds Fitness Spa
- May 2005 - December 2010: chief executive, Landmark Training
- 1993-1998: BA in German, Spanish and European Studies, University of Strathclyde
