Leaders in Community Consultancy:

Here at LiC, We have been working very hard to set up part of the organisation as a social enterprise. So we have set up LiC Consultancy, with the support of Poplar HARCA www.poplarharca.co.uk and the Beyond the Barn team at Bromley by Bow Centre, http://www.bbbc.org.uk/pages/beyond-the-barn.

We work to provide engagement services to young people looking at ways to engage / empower young people. The LiC consultancy provides services to small/larger organisations to work with young people and improve their youth related services. Our Consultancy will support the increase of user participation amongst young people in both the public / corporate sector. This also allows us to support small/large organisations recruit by empowering local young people to gain knowledge and skills that can be used.

We have a track record of supporting organisations build services for and with young people. We have a contract with Poplar HARCA to develop a ‘youth inclusion panel’, which includes consultation and outreach. We have supported the Community Matters the National Federation of Community Centres, develop a ‘youth at the centre’ strategy which we launched nationally at their conference in Leicester, and we do various workshops and presentations to both larger organisations seeking to improve their youth engagement services.

Our aim is to support/enable and empower young people to take up leadership and management roles in decision-making structures in our local communities so they are equipped with knowledge about different services.

We train young people aged 18-25 to be heard and counted in structures such as Local Area Partnerships, Housing Estate Boards, Regeneration Boards and the likes.

In order to make this happen, we reach out to as many young people and encourage them to take part in various youth orientated and youth-led activities such as: Music making, awareness-raising workshops, information and advice on youth-related issues, referrals and skills training workshops. This has encouraged us to explore the possibility of setting ourselves up as a social enterprise, becoming a centre of excellence for youth leadership.

As an enterprise, we will seek to disseminate our model to other organisations involved in youth work that are looking at successful ways of working with young people.

We also work towards being able to assist/support and train young people in various Leadership skills to ensure that young people maximise career opportunities.

To achieve this, we aim to:

• a) Build a programme of capacity building for young people.
• b) Engage young people in managing and implementing community projects
• c) Train young people to become active members of decision-making structures including Poplar HARCA’s estate boards and other like bodies ie Local Area Partnership.
• d) disseminate LiC’s model of creating youth leaders
• e) Run Peer Leadership training for young people aged 18-25, in areas of, project management, community development, finance, youth work, creative arts, governance, Policies and Procedures.
• f) Train young people as consultants to support other service providers to develop a youth empowerment policy and agenda.