WAM YOUTH

29/01/2025

Update: 31 January 2025

Further to the Trustees’ update in October 2024, we can now confirm that our mentoring service will close on Friday 31 January 2025. Our head of Mentoring and Pastoral care, Ali Kirkwood has been working hard to ensure that ongoing support for young people has been set up with local charitable organisations. The trustees would like to take this opportunity to thank colleagues at The Rock and The Children’s Society for their much-valued engagement to help to ensure ongoing support.

WAM’s youth provision, which is based at the St Peter’s Centre, Winchcombe will continue under WAM until 28 February when it will then be transferred to St Peter’s. Bryoni Newell will continue as the community youth work manager and will become employed by St Peter’s. The trustees are most grateful to Bryoni for her dedication and commitment to maintaining youth provision during what has been an uncertain time for WAM and its staff and volunteers. The trustees also wish to thank colleagues at St Peter’s for their enthusiasm and willingness to continue this much-needed provision for young people in our local area.
After the end of February, the trustees will be working to formally close WAM. However, this will take some months to complete all the necessary formalities. During this time, any queries about mentoring or safeguarding should be emailed to [email protected].

For mentoring queries, please head your email MENTORING. For safeguarding queries, please head your email SAFEGUARDING. If the matter is urgent, you can call Chris on 07736 933105. Non-urgent calls should be made to Colin (Chair of the Trustees) on 07515 630222.

Our regular donors, to whom we express our sincere thanks, have been contacted individually about arrangements to close or change their donations. If you are a regular donor and have not received any information, please contact Colin on 07515 630222.

The WAM Trustees (27.01.25)

29/01/2025

Mentoring update: we have now closed our mentoring project and the last of our mentees have finished their mentoring or transferred to other organisations. Thankyou so much to The Rock Cheltenham, Cheltenham and Tewkesbury Youth Hubs run by The Children's Society, and Hope Mentoring for stepping in to allow young people ongoing support.

We are sad to have come to an end of a project that has made a difference to so many, but we are grateful for the time we had with each of the young people.

Our project which started in Winchcombe and grew into Cheltenham, Bishops Cleeve, Tewkesbury, Evesham and the Cotswolds grew in strength and numbers over the years.

We started keeping records of how long we mentored individuals from in 2017 and from that point till now we have mentored 103 children and young people, from 38 different schools or colleges, and some who have been home educated.

7 of our staff have been involved in mentoring at various points, supported by a strong team of 40 volunteer mentors. We have been blessed by each of their time, dedication, consistency and support of the young people who we have asked them to walk alongside. Each young person was offered an hour a week for a year: for some this was a short period, but a few individuals had support for up to 3 years!

It has been so good to hear from some of our mentees over the years, re-engaging with their families, with their education, progressing to college, starting work and travelling. For some, the steps are smaller less noticeable ones, but we are grateful to have been a part of their journey and trust that it will help them to build on what they have experienced with us in the future.

Thankyou to all those who have partnered with us, those who have funded us and those who have cheered us on.

It really has been a privilege.

31/10/2024

Today was Matt and Linda's last working day.

We are incredibly grateful to them both for their hard work over the last few years.

Linda has been amazing at keeping the office going, and helping us all with the behind the scenes admin which has made all of our lives easier, and helped us to be able to focus on working with the young people.

Matt came into the mentoring project at a time when it was growing fast and we needed someone dedicated to work with the young men and support our male volunteers. He's done a great job and has also been a well liked team member at the youth club in recent months.

Thankyou both. We're going to miss you 😢

21/10/2024

An important update from WAM's Trustees:

It is with great sadness that the Trustees must make you aware that, during the last year, financial fragility has impacted severely on WAM’s ability to operate and function on a sustainable footing and enable planning for the future. WAM is a small charity and, not dissimilar to other charities, it has become increasingly difficult to secure funding.

We are exceptionally grateful for the impactful work of our staff, and our much-valued volunteers who always have the interests of young people at the heart of what they do. Despite the challenges, many young people have benefitted from support during this last year, and they have told us how valuable that support has been.

Due to our very difficult financial situation, our mentoring service will be closing. We are in discussions with 2 other charities and endeavouring to formulate a plan for the ongoing support of the young people we are currently mentoring, and their mentors. We will speak to each family separately about their individual circumstances and any transitional plans.

Our Head of Mentoring and Pastoral Support, Ali Kirkwood, will be working part time for The Children’s Society and also setting up her own mentoring business, 'Hope Mentoring'. Our Mentoring Youth worker, Matt Voorbach is exploring a number of options but remains committed to working with young people. Our Charity Administrator, Linda Teague will be retiring. We take this opportunity to wish them all the very best for the future.

We are in conversation with each of our volunteer mentors so that those who want to continue mentoring can do so in another local charity.

The Community Youth work will continue for the near future until an alternative provider can be found to deliver open access youth work in Winchcombe.
Our Community Youth Work Manager, Bryoni Newell, has agreed to continue this work, for which the Trustees are most grateful. At the present time we work out of St Peters Centre, which over the past months has, at times, been at capacity. In order to cover the running costs and keep providing open access youth provision [our Monday & Tuesday Youth Club] in Winchcombe we are continuing to look for financial support. Therefore if you would like to contribute either financially or are interested in volunteering please contact Bryoni [[email protected]]

The Trustees of WAM are very grateful for the financial support we have received from a variety of sources over the years including individual donations, regular giving, and grant-making organisations. All monies received have been used to improve outcomes for young people.

The Trustees of WAM Youth

Please contact [email protected] if you have any questions.

22/08/2024

To all of our young people picking up results today. You are amazing, we're so proud of you.

You are a unique, awesome individual and the world needs you!

If you got what you need for next steps, fab well done!

And if you didn't, it's OK. You might not be able to see it now, but there will always be a way through, a slightly different path maybe but a way through.

If you would like to talk about your results with your mentor or youthworker the next time you see us, please do. We would love to support you.

A message to every young person who is getting their GCSE results today.

19/07/2024

Well done to everyone for making it to the end of the summer term! Our regular groups have finished for the moment...keep an eye out for updates re summer things.

In the meantime, our mentoring team are still out and about supporting young people 1:1 and will be over the holidays.

A big thanks to our staff, trustees and our amazing volunteers for everything they have been doing over the last year! We honestly couldn't do it without you.

WAM - we ALL Matter ❤️

19/07/2024

We've really enjoyed our small group sessions with Steve from ADHD Foundation exploring neurodiversity. Thanks Steve for helping us learn more about it all and in a fun way.
Hopefully we can do it again in one of the local secondary schools in the Autumn.

09/07/2024

For those young people who couldn't make it to our in person sessions around neurodiversity but are interested in finding out more, the content will be similar

Gloucestershire Young People - free series of webinars on ‘Living Successfully & Achieving with Neurodiversity’ 24th July for more info contact [email protected] ☂️

01/07/2024

27/06/2024

We are running 4 workshops alongside ADHD Foundation, starting next week, and have a few spaces. If you're 14-17 and are interested in finding out more, please get in touch. It will be held in Winchcombe, 4-6pm on Thursdays and Fridays. To book a place please contact [email protected] or [email protected]

22/04/2024

We’ve been working on something exciting!! 🤩

Over the last few weeks we have transformed The St Peter’s Centre, Winchcombe into a vibrant new youth space for young people!

The Lounge is open for anyone of Secondary school age on Mondays & Tuesdays from 3.30-6pm.

Come and hang out in a safe & warm space full of all sorts of things to do! We have board games, pool, TV,consoles, air hockey, craft & cooking!

We look forward to seeing you 😁

Big thank you to St Peter’s Church for letting us use their space to support young people 🎉🙌

21/04/2024

This is why our mentoring project is important, and also why we aim for a year of support. For some young people, we are the professional who has known them the longest. If you are in a position to support our mentoring project financially so we can support more young people, please contact us at [email protected]. We would love to meet and chat with you about the difference mentoring can make.

Imagine if every young person had at least one adult they felt safe to turn to when they're struggling.