Sport and Youth Crime Prevention
A programme within the Active Essex Foundation
The Sport and Youth Crime Prevention programme is a 3-year project delivered through the Active Essex Foundation and funded by the National Lottery, Essex Local Delivery Pilot and Essex Violence and Vulnerability Unit.
The project works with Locally Trusted Organisations (LTOs) across greater Essex who use sport and physical activity to engage and support young people who are involved in the youth justice system, presenting risk taking behaviours and vulnerable to exploitation.
Over the past 12 months, the Active Essex Foundation have increased their network of LTOs from 8 to over 50, providing support, training and resources for their staff and volunteers. In turn this enables the organisations to provide high quality support for young people through sport and physical activity and have the understanding and tools to produce monitoring and evaluation that evidence the positive impact this work is having.
This year has also seen the Foundation, secure funding from criminal justice partners for 3 part time support workers, linking young people involved in the youth justice system to sports delivered by Essex LTOs.
We’re really pleased that over the past 12 months, this project has supercharged the work being carried out with partners around sport and youth crime prevention. We now have a great working relationship with system partners in the youth justice system, including the Essex Violence and Vulnerability Unit, Essex Youth Offending Service, and Essex Police.Louise Voyce, Relationship Manager
Key Learnings
It's important to take time to reflect and understand the learnings from work undertaken, in order to focus on ways to improve in the future.
Insight and relationship led
Relationships and evidence are key to working more closely with the youth justice system
Evaluation toolkit for partners
An aligned monitoring and evaluation toolkit has been key to capture data and insight
Capturing case studies
Important to show LTO’s how impactful their work has been on this target group
As part of the Sport and Youth Crime Prevention project, the Active Essex Foundation have worked in partnership with a number of locally trusted organisations, to develop a programme that works collaboratively with the Essex Youth Offending Services.
The Sport and Life Skills programme provides young people with support and the opportunity to engage in physical activity and sport, alongside mentoring support and life skills development, such as living independently, shopping on a budget and CV writing.
