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Our CEO, Jon Harper was at the first event when the Prime Minister asked Dame Julia Cleverdon, vice president of Business in the Community, and Amanda Jordan OBE, joint chair of Corporate Citizenship, to write a report outlining what a social action journey would look like for young people aged between ten and twenty – a decade of social action. 

Following this event we have been engaged in supporting the development of the decade of social action action by engaging in various consultations, hosting those working on its development at our programmes and through our membership and participation in Generation Change who have been a pivotal partner of this work.

#iwill is a national campaign that aims to make social action part of life for as many 10 to 20 year-olds as possible by the year 2020. Through collaboration and partnership it is spreading the word about the benefits of youth social action, working to embed it in the journey of young people and creating fresh opportunities for the participation. The campaign is being coordinated by the charity Step Up To Serve.

When the #iWill campaign was launched almost two years ago Future Foundations pledged to support 10,000 young people to step up to serve by 2024 . We wanted our pledge to go beyond the campaign and take us to our own twentieth anniversary.

We are on track to achieve our pledge, and are excited to share we are likely to support more young people than we had pledged to support.

Since our pledge we have delivered the following programmes each year which have social action at their core:

  • Global Social Leaders – our flagship 12-day leadership programme helps young people learn how to lead themselves and how to create social action projects in their local community
  • McKinsey Leadership Academy – each year 100 students from over 90 schools from across the UK and Ireland have attended the programme and are then challenged to create a project
  • Wellington College Junior Social Apprentice – we supported Wellington College to enable students to take part in social action challenges in Birmingham and Newcastle
  • DfE Character Award – allowed us to create a bursary programme for UK students to take part in our flagship Global Social Leaders programme
  • Legacy Careers – this programme challenges sixth formers to step up to support Year 8 and 9 students learn about their career options
  • National Citizen Service – in Summer 2015 we delivered NCS in Chesterfield for over 180 young people

We are excited to see the double benefit our programmes are having on young people and on society. The scale and scope of our programmes has grown significantly over the last two years and we were proud to be recognised by the Department for Education for the impact we are having on young peoples character.

We would also like to highlight one of our teams who are making significant change in their community – they are tackling the important issue of Legal Highs and campaigning for them to be banned in their area with some success with their local council taking note following them securing over 1000 signatures in an online petition.

We want to take our pledge to the next level, and as we approach the #iwill anniversary and #iwill week  which is the week commencing the 23rd November, we are looking at how we enable more young people to take part in our programmes.

If you share our passion for helping young people become leaders in their lives and society, get in touch to explore how we can work together.