Our Story
Transforming the Field of Intervention with Young Communities
Streets of Growth’s backstory initially began with our founder's and co-founders own lived experience of growing up on inner-city council estates in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, which was on record as being one of the most socially deprived borough wards in the UK.
During the mid to late 1990s, as neighbours, we volunteered ourselves going out onto the streets often late into the night 24/7 trying to connect and reengage young people, who were being bullied or getting caught up and drawn to the allure of co-offending groups, gang postcode violence, criminality, and associated behaviours linked to exploitative harm and poverty.
© Copyright Image – Gary Kinsman
A chance meeting in 1998 with two Linguistic and Educational Anthropologists visiting from America's West Coast resulted in our founder being offered a one-week “arts education fellowship” to see examples of best practice youth arts enterprise approaches in the U.S. through The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Returning inspired and wanting to take his research to a whole different level, our Founder Darren Way was successful in being awarded a Churchill Fellowship in 2000 and embarked on an intensive long-term research residency shadowing, training and exchanging insights with some of the best youth intervention organisations and pioneering frontline practitioners overseas.
In 2001, Darren together with CEO Diane Peters and Co-Founder Lucky Nessa, explored the possibility of building a pioneering youth intervention organisation model here in London's East End.
From Humble Beginnings to
a Milestone Achievement
© Copyright Image – Diamond Geezer
On September 11th 2001, we established and formalised our very own grassroots community-led youth intervention charity utilising 'proven best practice' from overseas, which we translated, adapted and interweaved into our own cutting-edge approach here in the UK.
Stepping out to stand up against harm in our borough has not been easy. These are our communities and neighbourhoods, we are challenging and transforming. Neither has it been easy becoming a professional organisation ourselves and building a model that has a long-term home and financial resourcing to fund our multi-award-winning approach and life-changing work.
© Image Copyright – London Metropolitan Archives (City of London Corporation)
It has been an extraordinary journey of bold determination and resilience, starting in a dilapidated shopfront based in an area often used for anti-social behaviour. Then, having to move from one short lease space to the next as each was demolished as part of regeneration. Unperturbed, every move was a lesson learned and only made us and our cause even more resilient as we found and converted dilapidated spaces with no grant build funding and using 95% reclaimed, repurposed, upcycled materials and volunteered construction expertise. And yet, despite each physical logistics nightmare move and disruption caused to our project services, we maintained and sustained our practices and impacts working with our young target population to ensure underserved young people are safe from harm and have authentic social and economic opportunities in the regeneration of their neighbourhoods and beyond.
In 2022, we partnered with Unite Students and finally secured a new long-term home on the ground and first floor of their impressive 24-storey flagship student accommodation building at Hayloft Point in Aldgate East, London. Built directly above the historic ruins of a Sixteenth Century Elizabethan era 'open air' theatre originally called the Boar's Head Playhouse, this historic site of significant importance predates Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. Street of Growth's new EpiCentre is a two-storey glass-sided building with purpose-built multi-use modern theatre and creative incubator zones for lifestyle, education and employability progression.
In September 2023, to celebrate our 22nd Anniversary and mark the opening of our EpiCentre, we were most fortunate to host a visit from HRH Catherine, Princess of Wales, following a trip she made with her husband, HRH William, Prince of Wales, to Boston as part of the Earthshot Prize. As part of their visit, they went to see the pioneering work of one of our longstanding and loyal international partners. After visiting us, learning of our work and speaking with staff and young people, the princess explained that "Streets of Growth's model of approach should be the length and breadth of the country."
Today, nearly 6000 young people have transformed their life trajectories through our 30-month Stage-based Change Intervention Model. Many of our original young clients who have gone on to be successful in their own right are now senior managers at Streets of Growth, keeping our purpose and model of practice in the hands of the young people we serve. We are relentless in our pursuit of self-improvement, ambition and impact with our young clients, which is why we created our internal AR-CX Unit (Applied Research & Client Experience Unit). Our international collaborations are indeed a global movement in the advancement of this highly controversial, under-resourced and often misunderstood field. Since our founding, many national and international practitioners have visited us and taken learning back to inform their research and applied approaches.