What we do
Our Bridging Model
What started out over two decades ago as our going out onto the streets late at night to try and prevent and intervene on young people getting into difficulties, has been carefully crafted into a world class intervention model that uniquely blends both professional and community led intervention with socioeconomic transformations for young adults aged 15-25 years.
Although we work with key strategic partners to do this work, we don’t depend on projects, programmes, referrals or young adults walking through our doors to engage them. We target and go to the very point of their need and context, which can occur before, during and long after any engagement they may have in our building or our programming.
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Our Bridging Model™ offers four key interventions that make up our system of support for the young clients we serve and partner, namely:
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Lifestyle
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Environment
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Education
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Career
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Depending upon the level of need, our team support young adults anywhere between 0 – 3 years that involves the transitional phases of initiating change, engaging change, through to advancing in change as young adults shift their trajectory and position and begin to live a positive and progressive lifestyle.
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Our model is being formally launched this Autumn where more details and diagram’s will be added on this webpage.
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Our Bridging Programming
Streets of Growth are continually developing our programming models that improve the way we understand the field of intervention with young adults, and all are geared to tackle the disaffection going on in their lives and in their communities.
This disaffection includes educational and career drop-out, postcode territorialism, group/gang violence, criminality, drugs, and associated behaviours leading to harm, poverty, prison and institutional/welfare benefit dependency.
Each programme makes up our system of programming and don't operate in isolation because each is an interconnected part and phase of our Bridging Model™ in order to connect and transform lifestyles, environments, education and careers. Our programmes are always evolving in alignment with the ever evolving young clients who we encounter and who go through our model with differing needs. Below is our ongoing foundational street programme followed by two examples of current projects our young clients are currently engaging.
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Outreach and Street Intervention Programme
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Outreach and street intervention work are not ‘detached’ elements at Streets of Growth. We have designed them as a programme that is central to all other programming we offer.
For example; over the past year Streets of Growth has worked in an innovative partnership with the Police ASB team and Tower Hamlets Homes ASB team, bringing in Streets of Growth’s cutting-edge intervention model to provide a positive and sustainable route for young adults to make the lifestyle changes needed to break a cycle of harm, violence and poverty. Streets of Growth, with the police and THH, have developed an effective intervention pathway for identified young adults, which involves prevention and intervention, alongside law enforcement, when it is required.
But this area of our programming is not easy, extremely time consuming, challenging and can be met with reluctance, resistance and relapse from the young adult. But this is their starting point of need as we build relationships to engage and stay in it with them for the long haul, doing what it takes to help see them through to a healthier side of living.
Social Enterprise
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One exciting component that we incorporated into our programming in 2012 is our social enterprise Turning the Tables, an upcycling and repurposing vintage furniture project.
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Did you know? Over 7 million young people in the UK are living in families who cannot afford to replace a broken furniture or electrical item! At the same time, it costs approximately £200 per truckload to take dumped furniture and unwanted household items to landfill.
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Incorporated into our social enterprise is the BTEC Work Skills with each learning unit being built around the individual or group's need and ambition. For example:
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· Personal Awareness Development
· Character Building
· Time & Stress Management
· Product Design
· Assertiveness in Adult Working Environments
· Working within an organisation (Intrapreneurship)
· Setting up an enterprise (Entrepreneurship)
· Maintaining and sustaining employment
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Turning the Tables is a truly unique experience as it allows for a safe environment for young adults to learn the skills required for transitioning into the ever-changing competitive jobs market. Once items are transformed, young adults can either keep or choose to sell their finished products at our onsite outlet. As young adults turn disused or broken items around, so too, do they learn to turn their own lives around hence the title of our enterprise. At streets of Growth young adults work with us to repurpose over 80% of everything we use and discard, including our contribution to the reduction in dumped street furniture in our neighbourhoods and landfill.
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If you have any unwanted vintage furniture items, then do please get in contact with us.
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Young Parents
Our Young Parents Programme (YPP) supports parents and single parents who are between the ages of 15-25 years. Both research and our experience of young parents engaging our programme indicates that they face many challenges and problems associated with being young parents. Many find it difficult to stay in education, which makes it more difficult for young mothers/fathers to find and keep well-paying jobs or careers. Even for those who manage to hold down part time employment, they can experience annual earning losses of upwards of 15-35%.
Planned and unplanned pregnancies and parenting can strain and
end the relationships between young parents and add additional
tensions between them and their nuclear families. Depression can
be common among young parents as they may feel guilty or
anxious about the future as they become more and more
overwhelmed by their unfamiliar, ever-demanding roles as
parents or parent. This can take all the joy and fulfillment out of
young families if issues are left to manifest, especially for those
young parents who may not have the right level of support from
family or friends. Many may not feel they can’t ask for help from
family or organisations because they feel they will be judged or
worse.
But this is where the Young Parents Bridging Programme comes in.
We run weekly sessions where young parents can come in or we go to them where they feel safe to build a relationship of trust and unravel where they feel stuck or unsure. When they come to our centre we simultaneously support the young child at our creche facility whilst a young mother and/or father work with our team in personal development areas that include:
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Plan out their future
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Develop a personalised plan of action to achieve their vision
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Discover what wider external services and support mechanisms are on offer
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Supported into education programmes
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Supported to become employ-able and employed
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Relationship development coaching between themselves and their young child
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If you feel this is a programme offer that fits your needs then get in touch and speak to us.
“Thank you so much for your help. Without you I wouldn’t have got my job. You actually came at the right time – I seriously do not know how to thank you”
Our Impacts
The way in which we measure and prove our work is second to none. One of the biggest and most central challenges to our field of work is evaluation because we do not simply work with young people to get them on a programme or into a job and then moving on to the next cohort of willing young people.
That in itself is only measuring an ‘outcome’ and doesn’t measure how you got there, if they are still in a job, or if they have changed behaviours in their neighbourhoods outside of organisational settings.
The young adults we seek out and encounter are stuck, socially isolated, and often caught up in harmful and criminal lifestyles and negative peer associates. Our interventions are usually first met with resistance for the first 3 months, and even when a young person starts to engage several months down the line, they can slip back and relapse into self-defeating behaviours that require us to shift our strategies to re-engage them until they reach a stage of maintaining positive and progressive socioeconomic futures.
As the knowledge and delivery of our work evolved, it became obvious that we needed a far more robust measuring system that truly recognised the level of detail in which we go to to achieve our impacts with our young clients and partners. One that reveals what works and what doesn’t to ensure we are true to our vision, mission and values and is why back in 2014 we sort the help of one of our international collaborators to develop a measuring model that allows for undeniable evidence.
We have recently re-evaluated our entire model of work and now solely focus our intensive targeted support on high need and risk 15-25 year olds, and work with a total of 150 young adults per annum.
Since being established in 2001, a total of 3,300 young people have benefited directly from our work and services.
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Here are a few facts and figures to demonstrate the impact our work has had in the east end of London:
86% of the young adults we engaged with went on to successfully complete their secondary school education
85% who were not in education, employment or training were successfully re-engaged into sustained career progression pathways
69% of the young adults who we engaged with were prevented from getting involved in gang association and activity
39% with extreme gang relations who received intervention support were able to fully leave gang related friendships, violence and criminality
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Additionally, many of our young clients have also gone on to help and mentor others in their own communities, as well as support us here at Streets of Growth.
Awards & Recognitions
Chris Donavan Trust
2017 Winner
NatWest & RBS Skills & Opportunities Award for the London Region.
2017 Winners of the Lifetime Achievement Award
​The Chris Donovan Trust
2016 Winners of The Magic for Change Award
Portsmouth & District Magic Circle
Chris Donavan Trust
2014 Winners of The Dispossessed Fund Award for transformative work with gangs and vulnerable young people.
The Evening Standard
2013 Winners of The Jane Foster-Smith Memorial Award
The Chris Donovan Trust
2013 Finalists of The Redemption & Justice Awards
No Offence
Chris Donavan Trust
2012 Winners of Most Inspirational Person Award
Word4Weapons
2012 Winners of The Gold Star Restorative Justice Award
The Chris Donovan Trust
2010 Winners of Best Cycling Initiative for Young People Award
London Cycling Campaign
2004 Winners of The Social Entrepreneur Award
UnLtd
2001 Winners of The Viscount De L'Ise Award
Sir Winston Churchill Memorial Trust
2015 Winners of The Lighting the Fire Annual Excellence Awards
LEAP Confronting Conflict
2013 Winners of Outstanding Contribution & Positive Role Model
Leaders In Community
