AYF's Friends and Family Project

What AYF's Friends and Family Project did

The project delivered so many great activities for our families. These included: weekly after-school sessions at Orca Krafts; an October trip to Alton Towers; a visit to the mainland for the cinema; sessions at the Auchrannie sports hall and hot drinks after; a session with The Umbrella Holistic Approach doing drum healing, guided meditation, herbal teas etc; kayaking; archery; a guided tour on the Mogabout; and a weekend away to Edinburgh Zoo. The project also supported young people with ASN to attend our summer trip to Alton Towers, mental health retreat, swimming and ice skating, Youth Fest, Glasgow Science Centre, Flip Out, cinema and escape room, Above Adventure, and movie marathon.
All were designed in consultation with the families engaging with the project and many happened at their request.

Our beneficiaries were young people and their families from across the island. As the only youth work organisation on the island, many were already known to us, and we worked with Arran High School, the primaries, social services, Active Schools, the school nurse and other relevant partners to ensure we reached as many families as possible.

Much of the above was able to happen as the project allowed us to recruit a youth worker to specifically work on this and to build relationships with the families. The carers involved told us how great they felt getting a really rare chance to have time to themselves when we engaged the young people in short breaks.

We know the project was a success, particularly because the feedback from activities we delivered for both the young people and their families was so overwhelmingly positive.

The project addressed the Better Breaks priorities of Complex Needs, Sports & Active Leisure, Independence, & Transition To Adulthood.

What Arran Youth Foundations has learned

We have learned even more about working with young people with ASN and how to plan programmes around them and their needs. Considerations included things like the mobility of participants, the need for ride access passes at Alton Towers, hiring mobility scooters, visiting places when it was quieter, designing arts & crafts sessions around sensory needs and so on. All of this helps to make our project and the organisation as inclusive and welcoming as possible for all.

We have learned so much more about families, what goes on at home, and the kids themselves - so much of youth work ordinarily involves little to no contact with parents, so to have such long and meaningful chats with mums about their children really helped us to form a better understanding. Although the majority of the work we do will always be directly with the young people, we have learned so much about the benefit of working closer with their guardians.

We have also reached out and engaged new families simply through recommendation and connections that those engaged in the project made. These families did not come through the traditional connections of making links with the schools or our other partners, but through families who have kids with ASN. There is no doubt that these people with lived experience are often best placed to help form these connections.

How Arran Youth Foundations has benefitted from the funding

Funding from Better Breaks allowed us to try this project, which we anticipated would be a success and were told by families was needed. It was so gratifying to see it succeeding and to see how much the families got from it. We feel this has certainly strengthened the organisation's reputation and helped families to even better understand that we are an approachable organisation who are happy to design projects hand-in-hand with the young folk and families. As a result of this project, our services were expanded to new groups and activities.