Our 2025-28 Strategic Plan

To be the leading enabler of exemplary youth-led social action throughout Camden and Westminster. FYA has a track record of delivering high quality programmes of peer support, youth social action and youth voice in system change in Camden. Our model supports young people to work in teams to draw on the intersectionality and complexity of their experiences as young Londoners to lead social action and create system change. Nearly half the young people we currently engage with have lived experiences of social equalities and we want to continue this targeted approach, ensuring young people who experience the greatest challenges have the most opportunity to benefit from our programmes. We want to maintain this core activity across Camden and further embed the work in Westminster, ensuring a continued focus on excellence in delivery across all our programmes. Our four core areas of programme delivery are: 1.1.Community building – continue to provide informal and fun opportunities for young people to build community and establish relationships of trust with FYA within a culture of youth leadership. 1.2.Peer support and peer education programmes – help young people to develop confidence and creative outputs to support their own wellbeing and provide education, initial support and signposting to their peers. 1.3.Place based social action – support young people to develop and deliver events and projects that make a difference to the communities that they live in. 1.4.System change – support young people to influence and have a voice on issues, policies or services that impact their lives.

To expand and formalise progression-routes into youth leadership through FYA’s programmes and beyond Currently 66% of staff were previously young volunteers with FYA. For young people in our community, the relatability of the FYA team is one of our great strengths. Many other young people attend FYA programmes and stay on with the organisation in different roles, either moving onto further FYA projects, becoming FYA Ambassadors or training as youth coaches within our football programmes. This pathway is a real success story for many of our young people and staff. However, there is still work to do to ensure that all young people who take part in our programmes, whether in their school or youth centre settings, are aware of all the opportunities they could progress onto. We also want to create opportunities for young people receiving 1-2-1 statutory case worker support (for example within CAMHS, social care or Youth Offending) to benefit from our asset-based, group work approach to youth-led social action. The journey of young people within FYA is an area we are keen to understand further, so we can strengthen and develop more opportunities for young people to continue their journey with FYA after attending an initial programme. We want to: 2.1.Ensure all young people who take part in an FYA programme recognise that are joining part of a movement of young people creating positive change and know that there are further opportunities they can progress onto within FYA. 2.2.Embed pathways for young people to move through FYA into a second programme, onto the Ambassadors roles, paid roles and into roles of governance at FYA. We will review FYA’s pathways for young people, identifying the successes and areas for development and key actions. 2.3.Create flexible opportunities and pathways for young people to join FYA group work through joining individually or partner referral. This includes developing models in which young people can be referred from one-to-one statutory support (for example CAMHS or social care) into FYA group social action.