Opis organizacije

Depaul UK is a national registered charity working locally with homeless young people aged 16-25 -we have a staff of 170.

We work across five key activity areas:

1. Our accommodation based services are crucial to ensuring young people are safe and provided with opportunities to develop and learn skills towards moving into independent living. Our services also provide opportunities for young people to become contributing citizens within their local communities and build on social skills to become effective participants in community activities. Our residential staff teams are skilled in working effectively with vulnerable young people and have significant experience in both social care and youth work. Our accommodation services are modelled to provide young people with opportunities to learn the skills needed to live independently.

2. Community host based accommodation services provide vulnerable young people with a supported living environment in the home of a host householder. Nightstop services offer emergency, short term accommodation for a young person and our Supported Lodgings services enable young people who may not be suited to hostel-based services to receive support in a home environment.

3. Our offender services work closely with vulnerable young people within the criminal justice system to support their release from prison and their resettlement and re-integration into the community. Our staff teams work closely with prisons, youth offender institutes, probation services and courts to ensure young people are provided with the most appropriate support.

4. Our family mediation services provide intervention and mediation services to support vulnerable young people to reconcile relationships with their families and their community networks i.e. schools and colleges, youth centres, pupil referral units etc. This service also works in schools providing workshops and outreach.

5. Our education, training and employability programmes provide vulnerable young people with a safe and positive environment in which to learn and develop key skills, whilst also exploring sensitive topics such as anger management, money management, conflict resolution and health issues.

Depaul has over 35 projects throughout the UK that offer disadvantaged young people accommodation, training, and support to independent living. We also now have branches of Depaul in Dublin, Belfast, Ukraine, Slovakia, the USA and France. In Dublin and Belfast we offer similar services to young people and also have EVS placements.

We believe that EVS volunteers in our projects bring a huge benefit to the young people who we work with; bringing a European input to our work and an encouragement to our young people to broaden their horizons whilst at the same time enabling European young people to come and work with us to gain the skills to work with this client group in a safe and secure environment.

This is an application to expand our EVS placements In North East England to include our South Tyneside young people’s accommodation pathways service. Depaul UK has recently become lead partner in a consortium of organisations providing services across the borough. We already host five volunteers in Newcastle and in addition to volunteering in our Simonside House and Resettlement service some of them have spent time volunteering in our Jigsaw service in South Tyneside. We would like to formalise this arrangement by applying for this project in its own right.