Significant investment awarded for better tomorrows

Cumbria Youth Alliance are delighted to announce an award of £445,270 over 5 years benefitting 225 people who will receive training to upskill the youth sector to provide 20,000 hours of additional high quality youth work provision across the whole of Cumbria.  Improving life chances of young Cumbrians by building confidence and resilience, broadening their perspectives through new experiences and thinking, whilst growing a talent pool of more confident and qualified youth workers. Youth Workers, volunteers and people aspiring to have a career in youth work can access high quality level 2 and level 3 youth work certificate training, along with the ability to network, learn from others across the region and gain additional training and support.

In collaboration with Cumbria Community Foundation and the Better Tomorrows programme, CEO Becky Wolstenholme said, ‘we are absolutely delighted to lead the training element of the Better Tomorrows programme and thanks to National Lottery players for this additional funding, we can now have a long term training programme to support the vital youth organisations throughout Cumbria, and work towards a breadth of offer throughout the whole of Cumbria, so more young people can benefit’. David Beeby, Chair of Cumbria Community Foundation added, ‘Despite compelling evidence of the significant benefits of youth work there had been more than a decade of massive reductions in financial support for the youth sector. The Better Tomorrows Programme was created to turn the tide and invest in our young people. Over the last 2 years we have provided thousands more young people in Cumbria with access to quality youth work. In order to do that we also needed to train more youth workers. Working with Cumbria Youth Alliance we started the training programme over 2 years ago. This wonderful news from The National Lottery Community Fund is absolutely fantastic. As a result, we will be able to continue to build the cohort of trained youth workers in Cumbria over the next 5 years alongside the separate grants we are providing to fund salaries for new youth work roles.’ 

If you would like more information about the programme, please contact Juan@cya.org.uk