Talent – Young People in Action

Dave Wiles (FYT The Haunted World of El Superbeasto download ) and Tim Evans (Worth Unlimited) are walking/hitching between, Bristol and Birmingham, and then heading north with only £10 in their pockets, collecting stories of hope from young people, once back they aim to release the stories to the media to counteract the predominance of negative coverage that young people seem to attract. They are in part lauching a new youth initative fund, that is to be raised by young people for young people. We are giving away £1000 to youth groups in £10 notes with the challenge to turn it into £100 by Christmas to fund the trust, if you want your youth group to get involved contact Nigel Pimlott. If you want to hear from Dave and Tim they are being interviewed tomorrow on Radio 5 Live (medium wave 693 and 909) between 10am and 10-30am
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Extract from the Project Outline

Talent Young People in Action

Introduction: Frontier Youth Trust (FYT) and Worth Unlimited are two organisations that work with and for young people on the margins of society. We have joined forces to create a trust fund that will be controlled by young people – for young people and which will enable them to act on their own concerns. We are tired of the negative stereotypes of young people and want to enable them to demonstrate that they are a positive force for change in society.

Creating the trust: In order to create the Young People in Action Trust fund we are giving away £1000 in £10 notes! We are offering 10 to any of the youth projects/groups that we link with and are asking them to take 3 months to turn this into as much as they can. As Christian organisations we see this as related to the parable of the talents (see Matthew 25:14) however we are quite happy about the double meaning in that we believe in young people and want to give them an opportunity to demonstrate their talent. We want to end the 3 months of talent multiplication by December 2006 as a symbolic gesture to celebrate Christmas. Just imagine if each group raises 100 with their 10 this would launch our youth led trust at the start of 2007 with £10,000! We also intend to continue fund raising to enable the trust to grow.

Young People in Action: We hope that the youth projects that FYT and Worth involve, in partnership with local youth workers, will catch the vision and show off their entrepreneurial skills. We will provide an ideas pack and guidelines for youth groups to use as they seek to invest their talents, but some of the ideas that have already emerged include:

Creating and selling hand made Christmas cards

Running a fare trade caf in a local hall

Selling hand made jewellery

A cake stall

Make over stall

Creating and selling a book of youth poetry

Organising a fashion show using charity shop clothes!

What we hope is that young people will invest their time and energy in some kind of action that will be fun and which will raise awareness of their potential as well as funds!

To launch the initiative the two directors of FYT and Worth Unlimited will be given £10 to go on the road for a week in order to collect 100 stories of hope about young people as a sponsored activity. During this time they will travel to Bristol, Cardiff, Birmingham, Liverpool and Glasgow with no resources or arrangements other than contact with several local youth work projects, radio stations and their £10! Tim and Dave see this as an alternative model for Christian leaders to promote their ideas a substitute for large scale Christian conferences! The book with the stories of hope will be on sale during October.

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