The Isle of Wight Youth Trust has been serving young Islanders for over 35 years, but the past 6 months has seen an unprecedented rapid change in services.
When COVID-19 caused the UK to go into lockdown, the Youth Trust quickly adapted to meet the needs of the young people it serves and is continuing to do so.
Youth Trust Chief Executive, Clare Cannock, explains that in March, the charity moved all of their services from face to face to online and phone delivery, to ensure that young people continued to have a trusted service to turn to for support with their mental health and emotional wellbeing.
“Our core service is one-to-one counselling for young people between the ages of 4-25 years. Last year, around 1,300 young people were referred to our services. We offered 7,703 counselling appointments, all of which were face to face. To move an entire service to remote delivery amid a pandemic was a tough job, but as always our team was incredible and got it done in just two weeks.”
“At the Youth Trust, one of our greatest strengths is that we are led by our young people. We are responsive to the things that young people across the Island have to say and can move quickly to adapt our services. The feedback from our online service has been incredible. We’re delivering the same, high quality service that we have built our reputation on over the years, which is so important to us.”
“In addition to moving our one-to-one counselling online, we’ve also delivered online group work for young people and training across the community including to a number of educational professionals and parents.” She said.
Clare adds:
“In addition to our online services, we are also piloting a walk and talk service for young people who are unable engage on the phone or online. This was something that we’d been exploring with the young people on our Youth Mental health Taskforce for some time and it’s great to be able to offer this, albeit in a limited capacity.”
Article continues below this advertisement “Our current challenge is preparing our building for face to face work in a COVID safe way. We’re carrying our works to the shop front below our headquarters in central Newport, which we will be opening as a Youth Hub in due course.”
“This year has been really tough on everyone’s mental health. We would like to remind young Islanders that whatever it is they’re going through; they are not alone. Here at the Youth Trust we will always work to meet their needs. Life can be hard, but accessing support shouldn’t be.” She said.
