The theme of our recent Reaching People member meeting on 6 June 2025 was ‘supporting young people’ and we would like to thank Kieran Breen from Leicestershire Cares for facilitating the session. Kieran has summarised the meeting in the article below… 
 
It was a pleasure for our staff and young people to attend an engaging and informative meeting, hosted by our friends at Reaching People, where we discussed how the community sector can better support young people. 
 
All of those attending had a lot of face to face experience of working with young people across the city, from a diverse variety of backgrounds. But the real experts on the day were the two young men, Delvin and Wahaj who attended. 
 
They shared: 
 
What we need help with is finding work and getting the skills and confidence to go for a good job 
Young people often have no one to talk to so having a space where you can go and be listened to is really important 
Lot of young people are isolated so having an opportunity to connect and make friends and connections is really important 
Support young people speaking out and be creative 
 
In discussion, the community workers agreed with the young people and were keen to explore how we can work together to offer more joined up support to young people. All present recognised that young people are often dealing with a complex range of issues and no one organisation has all of the answers. Many face challenges winning funding to support this much needed work, but were determined to work together: 
 
“If we can work together without, ego, silo, or logo, we will be much stronger and better able to support the young people.” 
 
Going forward connections made will be followed up - for example, Aaron from Leicestershire Cares will be seeing if he can run music/podcast workshops for some of the partners. Kieran, Sangeeta and Sarah, the CEOs of Leicestershire Cares and Reaching People, will develop an action plan to enable both organisations to support this ‘joined up’ approach. 
 
“It was a really useful meeting and looking forward to working together and making change happen.” 
 
 
Share this post:

Leave a comment: