Every Saturday, we hold a casual drop-in session for students to catch up on homework with help from mentors, or just to hang out in a safe, supportive environment.

Time: 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM at our Youth Centre.

These weekly catch-ups provide tutoring, fun group activities, and a free lunch. Youth build friendships and get help with schoolwork in a warm, friendly atmosphere.

Weekend and Holiday Development Camps to enhance youth engagement and exposal

As part of the Coaching and Mentorship pillar, the programme will introduce intensive weekend and school holiday camps for BME youth to drive personal development. 

These camps provide an immersive, structured environment outside of the youths’ everyday routines, where participants can focus on growth without distractions.

Each camp is designed to instil discipline, help youth set goals, and expand their vision for the future through practical experiences and guided reflection. A regular camp schedule from morning routines to team challenges helps young people develop positive habits and self-discipline. 

By stepping into a new setting with clear expectations and supportive mentors, participants learn to push their comfort zones and build resilience, laying the groundwork for greater confidence in their day-to-day lives.

Structured Activities: The camp curriculum centres on activities that cultivate leadership, teamwork, and self-reflection. Youth engage in team-building exercises e.g. outdoor challenges or group projects that promote trust, cooperation, and communication. 

They take part in leadership development workshops where they might lead a team activity or solve problems collaboratively, developing decision-making and responsibility. 

Reflection sessions such as journaling or group discussions are built into each day to encourage self-awareness to help campers assess what they learned, set personal goals, and articulate their aspirations.

These structured activities are both fun and formative. For example, games and challenges are deliberately used to teach goal-setting, adaptability, initiative, and reflection in an engaging way. 

Throughout the camps, adult coaches and mentors facilitate the exercises and debriefs, helping youth draw connections between the activities and their personal life goals. This intensive format not only strengthens soft skills like leadership and teamwork, but also reinforces discipline and a growth mindset.

The unfamiliar camp environment “a world of adventure and challenge” away from home requires youth to adapt and collaborate, which accelerates their development of new skills and confidence. 

Such experiences have been shown to yield tangible improvements in young people’s self-confidence, self-awareness, and aspirations after even a short immersion. By the end of each camp, participants will have practiced setting goals and working toward them, reflected on their values and vision, and built camaraderie with peers all key outcomes that complement their one-on-one mentoring.

Integration with Mentorship: The weekend and holiday camps are fully integrated into the programme’s coaching model. Mentors participate alongside youth during these retreats, guiding activities and providing feedback in real time. 

This deepens the mentor-mentee relationship in a shared, hands-on context. It also gives mentors rich material to draw on in subsequent coaching sessions. They can reference a team obstacle the mentee overcame or a leadership role they tried at camp when discussing personal growth.

The camp setting creates a close-knit community where supportive adults and peers work together, mirroring a family-like support structure. This dynamic aligns with best practices that show youth benefit when they can strengthen connections with peers and caring adults during learning experiences. 

In campfire talks, goal-setting workshops, and even mealtime conversations, mentors help youth translate the camp’s lessons about discipline and teamwork into concrete plans for school, career, and life.

Overall, the camps serve as a catalyst for mindset change. By immersing participants in an environment of positive challenges and support, they begin to see themselves as capable leaders and learners. The skills and confidence gained carry over into their regular environment, reinforcing the ongoing mentoring and enabling each young person to envision a more ambitious future path.

These opportunities are designed to expose BME youth to different cultures, environments, and high-achieving peers, an invaluable perspective for those who may have had limited exposure beyond their local area. Many of our participants have never travelled outside their city or country, so an overseas educational trip or conference can be life-changing.

By venturing abroad or interacting with youth from other regions, they will see firsthand that the world is bigger than their immediate community and brimming with possibilities. Travel is widely recognised as a powerful tool for learning. It “provides children with the opportunity to see the world and reflect on the person they aspire to be, their role as a global citizen, and the changes they want to make”.

Simply put, these experiences will help break the cycle of limited exposure by showing our youth new aspirations, lifestyles, and career paths they might not have imagined before.

Examples of potential destinations to be refined based on partnerships and youth interests include:

A cultural immersion in an African country. For example, visiting Ghana or Nigeria to explore historical sites, connect with local youth organisations, and see thriving Black-led businesses and communities. Experiencing the heritage and modern vibrancy of an African nation can instil pride in cultural roots and illustrate successful role models who look like our participants.

Exploration of a historic European city for instance, a trip to Rome, Paris, or Athens where youth can walk through world-famous museums, monuments, and universities. Standing in places they have only read about makes history come alive and shows them the global legacy of ideas, leadership, and innovation. Such exposure helps broaden their perspective on world history and encourages them to dream beyond the limits of their hometown.

Visits to an innovation hub for example, touring a major technology or entrepreneurship centre such as a startup campus in Berlin or an innovation hub in Nairobi. By meeting young professionals and seeing cutting-edge projects firsthand, youths can expand their career aspirations into fields like tech, science, or the arts. They witness dynamic work environments and learn that industries shaping the future are accessible to them too with the right skills and determination.

These trips will be carefully planned as learning expeditions, balancing adventure with reflection. Each day might include activities like site visits, university campus tours, meet-and-greets with local youth groups or mentors abroad, and evening debrief sessions to reflect on what was learned.

Through travel, our youth will gain new perspectives and adaptability encountering different languages, foods, and customs teaches them to appreciate diversity and adapt to new situations, further building resilience. Crucially, such journeys can ignite motivation: exposure to successful communities and innovations in other countries can inspire participants to set bigger goals for themselves.

They return home not only with memories, but with an expanded sense of what they can achieve in life. And importantly, we will seek funding and scholarships to ensure no young person is left behind from these trips due to cost as one youth voyage program noted, life-changing travel was “only possible” because the organisers subsidised the trip for a student who otherwise “could never have afforded to take part”.

We will send cohorts of our young people to structured youth events for example, a UK-wide youth leadership summit or an international youth conference/symposium in Europe or Africa. 

These conferences bring together motivated youth from different cities and countries, creating a melting pot of ideas and peer learning. Our participants will have the chance to meet and learn from peers beyond their usual circle, exchanging stories and aspirations with teens who have different backgrounds.

In this environment, they can build a national network of friends and mentors and realise that they are part of a global generation with shared dreams and challenges. Conference agendas typically include keynote speeches by inspirational figures, skill-building workshops, and team projects, all of which will reinforce our programme’s lessons on goal-setting and leadership. The very act of traveling to a conference, navigating a new city, and interacting in a professional setting further boosts their confidence and social skills.

Attending these forums is also about fuelling inspiration. Hearing success stories and seeing youth-led projects from around the world helps our young people imagine greater possibilities for themselves. For example, the purpose of youth conferences is often to “increase hope for the future, promote skill development, engage in peer-to-peer learning and strengthen connections with peers and supportive adults”. By immersing our participants in such optimistic and empowering environments, we aim to raise their sights. They will participate in meaningful conversations about their goals for the future with a broad audience, not just within our programme but with other ambitious youth and mentors nationwide.

This can validate their dreams and give them practical ideas on how to pursue them. We will encourage our youth to present or take active roles at these conferences for instance, joining a panel or a youth-led project showcase, which will further build their leadership and public speaking experience.