Young UnLtd
Since 2001, UnLtd have inspired and supported over 12,000 young people (aged 11-25) to develop entrepreneurial solutions to social problems which enable them to transform the world in which they live. We have achieved this through offering a unique combination of cash, development support and networking opportunities across a range of programmes including the Millennium Awards Trust, The Big Boost, The Youth Transition Awards, UnLtd Sport Relief, and most recently, The Big Challenge.
Using this experience, we have developed Young UnLtd, a youth participation programme which supports Young Social Entrepreneurs (YSE’s) through a simple and highly effective delivery model, which allows young people to undertake marketing activities, lead our decision making, provide peer to peer support / networking and undertake world’s largest ever youth-led YSE research project.
Young UnLtd are proud that the Big Lottery Fund have endorsed our model of delivery and have agreed to support our continued development over the next 5 years, allowing us to reach over 20,000 young people living within the most disadvantaged communities in England.
From May 2009, we will integrating our existing youth programmes and will begin testing our approach with a range of new partner organisations, leading to wider project collaboration and the development of 1,500 young leaders all of whom will participate at different stages of our YSE model. We are committed to sharing our learning with thousands of youth sector support agencies, local authorities, national government and the wider third sector.
By 2014, Young UnLtd will be at the heart of a new youth-led revolution within social leadership and we invite you to join us.
Visit the UnLtd jobs page for more details of our current opportunities.
Big Challenge that UnLtd are running in partnership with Changemakers gives young people the power and the trust to find innovative solutions to the major challenges that society face today. It is a three year programme, funded by Vodafone and v, with a different ‘Challenge’ as the focus each year which could include problems such as gang crime or climate change.
The decisions about which challenges are addressed, which young people are given a variety of resources to tackle these challenges and how the programme will work are the responsibility of the 25 members of the Youth Leadership Team. The Youth Leadership Team will come with a variety of skills and experiences from their own projects and will then be equipped with everything that they need to support more young activists in the community. The Team are recruited annually and have a pot £60 000 to spend in the way they think will have most impact and is most entrepreneurial in tackling society’s most pressing problems.
The young people who are chosen by the Youth Leadership Team to implement their ideas will receive intensive support and coaching from the Youth Challenge Manager, Abby Kegg, the Youth Leadership Team and other social entrepreneurs in our networks. The project will also engage with potentially thousands more young people who will actively participate through online voting, downloading of project development tools for their own ideas, volunteering with campaigns and becoming inspired to do something within their own communities.
This year's challenge is called 'Many Cultures, Many Individuals, How can you create unity in your community?View the winning projects on the website now.
We are now recruiting for Youth Leadership Team members.
If you are aged 16-25 and want the chance to make decisions about this UK wide programme then please visit the Big Challenge website for more details!
Big Challenge website
The Children and Young People Strategic Grant (CYPF)
The CYPF Strategic grant aims to equip young people, aged 11-25 and on the margins of society, with the skills and resources needed to make the transition to becoming young social entrepreneurs, active citizens and community leaders. We do this by conducting comprehensive youth-led research into the barriers facing young social entrepreneurs and sharing our findings with organisations across the UK.
Included in this is UnLtd’s work with the development of the Foundation for Young Social Entrepreneurs (FYSE). FYSE will support and encourage young people to establish and sustain their own social enterprises and enable them to influence and challenge national and local policy as well as decision makers.
The first interim report into the barriers facing young social entrepreneurs is now complete and we will be sharing our findings with a range of organisations, government bodies and decision makers throughout 2009. If you would like more information out this report please contact us. It is also available here: (UnLtdWorld place for report).
