Surrey Youth Focus’s mission is to significantly improve the lives of young people in Surrey . We do this by: CHAMPIONING THE YOUTH SECTOR We help strengthen voluntary and charity youth organisations across Surrey, including organisations helping the most disadvantaged young people in society as well as more mainstream: • Young people with mental health issues and substance abuse • Young people with learning and physical disabilities • NEETS (Not in Employment, Education and Training) • Homeless charities • Youth clubs • Uniformed organisations • Sports organisations How do we strengthen them? • We help them find the resources that they need to serve their clients. • We help them to innovate, sometimes through large, sector wide initiatives, sometimes through a little helping hand. • We promote good practice, efficiency and effectiveness. • We represent their interests with statutory bodies and other organisations across Surrey and beyond. INSPIRING COLLABORATION We encourage collaboration between a wide range of organisations including voluntary and charities, businesses, schools, colleges and local authorities in order to: • Generate new exciting opportunities for young people, especially the most deprived in the county. • Develop collaborative solutions to problems experienced by young people. Examples: We EMPOWERING YOUNG PEOPLE We are moving into a new area of work, around empowering young people. We want to encourage and support young people to do “Youth Social Action” – that is to take action to improve the world around them, thus developing confidence and self-belief. We want young people’s voices to be taken into account by statutory bodies and society, especially when services (e.g. health, employment support) are being designed for them. We want a wide variety of young people to be heard, not just the articulate ones.