Positive Youth Foundation - Video and audio transcripts

oh the next one is the positive youth foundation I can see you on the screen now Taiba so welcome. Yeah thank you uh hi everyone I'm Taiba from positive youth foundation I'm not sure if any of you guys are aware of what we do so here's a little introduction positive youth foundation we're a registered charity that has two distinct strands of activity we support young people aged 8-25 we support young people through advocacy and consultancy services um supporting young people through youth work our main aims are to raise aspirations of young people who are facing challenging circumstances through identified areas of work our work includes frontline services to young people such as programs relating to education employment training healthy lifestyles arts and culture social action and supporting through strategic policy leads commissioners funders agencies across the youth work sector you can go to the next slide.

Just a disclaimer we're youth workers and our aim is to understand the impact of youth work especially myself and obeyed we work with newly arrived young people and our work depicts trying to understand the mental health of newly arrived young people aged 22. We're not certified mental health practitioners and we do not consider ourselves a mental health charity but through the nature of our close work with young people we've noticed that newly arrived young people have complex mental health needs and these usually arise from trauma duty displacement and through the relationship between youth workers and young people we've identified triggers and gaps in the mental health systems for newly arrived young people

Next slide please. So what's distinctive about PYF uh we feel that youth workers bring a different professional skill to clinical or therapeutic intervention our work is built principally around establishing relationships we believe that they're key to the work that we do and the relationship that we build is about trust and listening to the young person on an individual basis and trying to find ways to support them individually we use a wide range of activities to help young people in building their confidence through arts music sports exercise mentoring whatever that young person is interested in we try to support them around that we try and buy in partners through different means so we have an experienced group staff as well as having external practitioners come in where we don't have that expertise and our organisation our infrastructure is built through referral processes monitoring and evaluation safeguarding etc

next slide please um involved so involved is a strand um within PYF um and our involved strand is all about supporting newly arrived young people from migrant refugee and asylum seeking backgrounds that's both EU, EEA and non-EU and EEA young people our programs focus on young people's personal social and emotional well-being and are delivered by experienced youth workers some of whom are were once newly arrived themselves so the current involved team I think four or five young people came through the program themselves and they've settled here in Coventry and have been here for four to five years so they speak the languages of the young people they're currently working with and that that's massive in the work that we do as they come through the program themselves and they're supporting young people that are on the same resettlement schemes or came to the country through similar means we believe that integration is the key for newly arrived young people to live a happy healthy inclusive and meaningful life and we understand that the mental health needs of newly arrived young people is key to their settling into Coventry we can't expect newly arrived young people to flourish and to settle and to progress if their mental health needs and basic needs aren't met first so we want to ensure that services working on integration pathways um have those systems in place within their services to support their integration so integration is a two-way thing it's not just a supporting newly arrived young people to integrate it's the services themselves having systems that enable newly erasing people to integrate we're currently working on sharing our learnings and findings with services working with newly arrived people and that has happened through the millionaire me programme the minion review program supports newly arrived young people aged 8-13 and that program has allowed us to really focus on the mental health needs of newly arrived young people um we're looking at acute levels of stress and PTSD and mental health but in doing that we've learned so much about the needs that newly arrived young people have um we believe that holistic early intervention um stops where possible the progression of further mental health or severe mental health issues so we try and support them at an earlier stage so that they have systems in place so that when triggers do happen they've got these support systems and networks in place for them to fall back on next slide please our current involved programs are a million and me so um that is a program that's funded by BBC children in need supporting younger age group which is eight ages eight to thirteen we have the resettlement programme through the Coventry city council and we also have our amith funded my Coventry program these are the three main programs that we are currently working on involved
um this is uh this is a small case study um of a young person that came through involved through the resettlement scheme um she came from Syria and we met her last year in Christmas time and on one session we had a talent show and she asked if she could share a poem and this poem she shared with us on her first day of us meeting her and this is what she said this is my life story it's very sad I wish I could change it but sad house it's just so bad for my health

and I think the last bit she asked she's asking god why and this kind of just brings the reality of what a newly arrived young person has faced like newly arrived young people that have come through refugee backgrounds have fled war they've seen really terrible things um and of course that affects their mental health so when they do come here they're very resilient and they don't always show how they're feeling and it takes them a long time to for them to be able to express how they're feeling because they don't have the language in place so if there aren't translators in schools or at the NHS or in different services their mental health kind of is neglected and it's not always considered or it's not always on the agenda because they can't express themselves in the first place so as soon as we heard this from Galia we put interventions in place and started giving her one-to-ones and then within five weeks like her mental health improved massively and that just goes to show the importance of having like you know translators there and like staff in place that can speak to newly arrived young people and understand the kind of journeys that they've been through if we can go to the next slide uh one way that we do one-to-ones with newly arrived young people is schwem Webbs so that is the short version of the Warwick Edinburgh mental health wellbeing scale we do these with young people across all the um programs um at PYF whether they're involved or on on our other strands but um on the millionaire me program we do this um on the first week of or the first few weeks of us supporting them and then maybe five weeks later and then 10 weeks later just so we can see the impact that we're having on this young person and some of these questions involve us asking how happy they feel uh how settled they feel things that they're enjoying things that they're finding difficult um really basic questions that kind of open up these further conversations about how they're feeling and that really helps us to paint a picture of how they're feeling when they first met us um and then the impact that we've had through intervention after a few weeks and then towards the end of the programmes with guardians specifically it allowed us to have conversations about things that she was finding difficult in school like being bullied because she speaks different languages um and we were able to like liaise with the school and sort that situation out for her so we feel that these kind of one-to-ones um are really key to us understanding young people's mental health and well-being next slide please um that's all for now but if there's anything else that you would like to know please do um ask us um just try doing that quite quickly and quite fast there's so much more that we do but if there's um specific work that you're doing with newly arrived people and you'd like to support them then do come to us and if you do have any questions please do let me know thank you ty about really helpful overview um and I know it's a lot to get through it's just a short space of time so I appreciate that thank you.