In this series of case studies, sector leaders outline some of the steps they have taken to drive climate action in their organisations. This doesn’t mean they have completed everything, but that they have picked a place to start, which unblocks fear and drives action in other areas. We hope this series gives you lots of ideas for climate action in your own organisation. If you would like to submit a case study to keep this series going, please email heloisa.righetto@acevo.org.uk.
This week, we hear from Voyage Youth, a social justice charity working to enable young people to enhance their skills, interests and abilities and reach their full potential.
Area of focus: adapting services to incorporate climate action; community behaviours
Can you describe the actions you have taken? How did you identify the problem and implement a process?
At Voyage Youth we work with socially disadvantaged and excluded youth to help them bridge the gap between their schools, communities, the criminal justice system and employers. We deliver programmes which work to challenge social perceptions of young BAME people and provide opportunities for them to make a positive impact in their communities and neighbourhoods. Initially, our organisation engaged young people with a view to stimulating employment opportunities within the criminal justice institutions (courts, lawyers and police). But with the growing context of racism, discrimination and increasingly worsening relations between young people and the Police we changed our focus to progressing young people towards generic forms of employment. While this has been a reasonably successful formula, we always felt that our focus on challenging racism, exclusion, encouraging healthy police relationships didn’t quite align or connect to tangible employment pathways. So, after seeing growth in our incomes and our partnerships (post George Floyd) alongside growing insecurity around developing sustainability strategies an expansion paper was produced. Our trustees chose to respond by prioritising sustainability which has led to a review about the leadership focus of our work in communities. Other drivers included the need to align with industries that were underserved by people of colour and at the same time there was a high degree of receptivity to the sector being open to greater inclusion and diversity.
To us, engaging with green industries felt like an ideal way of building a pipeline of meaningful activity for our young people, in a way which benefited all stakeholders. The climate movement generally lacks diversity and can fail to recognise the very significant impacts of climate change on marginalised communities, especially people of colour. This can make it seem an unwelcoming space for young people of colour meaning they miss out on great opportunities. At the same time, green organisations often lack understanding about how to engage closely with people of colour and understand their priorities when working with these communities. We felt we could build connections between the idea of recognising that climate change is a key concern for young people, but also a space where young people of colour felt excluded; the desire of the climate movement to engage with these communities; and climate change as a national priority, and therefore an opportunity for employment. The climate agenda presented an opportunity to build and expand our services into a new space, but with a clear user journey that had the potential for lasting impacts.
One of our most successful courses is Safer Cities, engaging young people around community safety. We have developed a new course called Sustainable Cities, which we are about to start testing and piloting. This course connects young people with organisations and industries working on environmental issues, breaking down barriers, silos and engaging youth with an issue they have previously felt was not for them. The course is completed over four or five months, and our graduates can then explore three years of engagement: progressing them towards volunteering in the first year, work experience in the second, and potential internships or employment in the third. We are keen to keep conversations about challenging self-notions, anti-racism and self-motivation live throughout this course, to ensure it speaks to young people’s ongoing concerns and brings inclusion work closer to green industries.
We received a huge amount of support from climate organisations, who welcomed the opportunity to engage meaningfully with a more diverse group of stakeholders and provide a natural route for young people to consider green employment as a realistic opportunity. We are currently exploring accreditation options for the course and developing the programme with partners to reach more young people. If you are a climate organisation that might be interested in partnering with us, please complete our contributors survey.
What has been successful? What would you most like to celebrate from the action you took?
I would really like to celebrate the engagement with our Youth Advisory Board on this issue. Our Youth Advisory Board formed in 2019 is made up of 15 young people of a range of ages and led by one of our graduates; one member of this advisory group has joined our board of trustees, to bring youth voice right up to governance level. Establishing this board helped us recognise at governance level that what young people wanted wasn’t necessarily expansion of the same courses into new areas, or delivering more of the same services, but wanting to widen our scope as a charity. The ideas around green industries and future employment in the climate space wouldn’t have been identified without engaging our young people. Bringing in green thinking isn’t just about a new course, new partners and new income, but about supporting them to engage with a language and industry which has previously felt very unfamiliar.
It’s been great to bring that diversity of thought into governance spaces, which can often be austere and lack diversity; just 8% of trustees are people of colour. The opportunity to shape our programmes and feed into board thinking makes clear that there is a ladder of progress at Voyage Youth, keeping young people engaged with a view to demonstrating where they can influence and could end up in the future.
What has been most challenging? Have you had to change your approach in any areas?
Testing this new programme is about to start and we are planning a wide range of testing spaces in community settings. We want to explore how we recruit young people as well as understand what sort of messages we need to include and help them understand that this could be for them; visiting secondary schools has been and continues to be challenging and we hope our new course and graduate programme helps to overcome some of the access challenges we are currently facing. We also want to break some elements of the course and test in different settings, with different age, risk and ability groups which will mean deploying different green partners into these settings.
A key area of challenge is understanding why young people might feel this issue isn’t relevant to them so we aim to explore this at every engagement opportunity. Testing will likely bring about more changes to our approach but as a completely new area of work it is really vital. In addition, training our partners on how to engage with young people of colour about their identity and resilience will be really important as well as encouraging partners to think about innovative ways to recruit more POC and sustain them.
What did you learn from starting work in this area? What learning points would you most like to share with other leaders?
We initially started our green journey looking at practical issues like saving paper and recycling. This work has allowed us to embed climate action into our ethos and ways of working, as well as building stronger engagement with young people on an issue they care about getting closer to. Changing our approach and not just rolling out the same programmes more widely has its risks, but we have had unexpected success with funding applications on this work and engaging our board with a new project steered by our youth advisory board has been really successful formula for stimulating raised levels of board level engagement and involvement.
Photo by Callum Shaw on Unsplash
