Aim

To allow us to take as many of our young homeless people for a day trip to sherwood pines, mountain biking, go ape and wood walking.

Hi! We are Branching Out in, we are a young person’s homeless supported living service based in Newark and Sherwood and Bassetlaw. We currently support over 50 young people aged 16-21 at any one time including young parents and their babies. We cover Newark, Ollerton and Retford and have a range of services from our 2 core units which are staffed 24/7, a number of cluster properties, which are similar to the accommodation that we support young people to move to independent living and some more bespoke accommodation for teenage parents and accommodation for some young people with higher support needs.

Our aim at branching out is to help as many young homeless people as possible, to provide them with a safe welcoming home where they can grow, develop and learn to live independently. Our young people come to us from a wide range of backgrounds from care leavers, domestic abuse saviours to ones who have sadly lost their only family and find themselves with nowhere to live. Many of our tenants don’t have any support from family at all or are estranged from those closest to them.

We work closely with social services, local colleges and education services, women’s aid, CAHMS, CGL, the local youth offender’s team and many more.

At Branching out we support our young people to access education, learn life skills, build support networks and gain confidence. Unlike many services we support our young people for a year after they have left our service with anything and everything from tenancy support to dealing with benefits claims and starting work. We have a dedicated resettlement worker who continues support once our young people move on to independent living. Some of our young people are with us for a few months while they get back on their feet and others need more support and may stay with us for a couple of years but ultimately our aim is for every one of our young people to learn the skills they need to be able to live on their own and become productive members of the local community.

When our young people are ready to move on we try to provide them with all of the basics they need in their first home, a lot of this is funded by our teams fund raising and individual contributions staff themselves find from friends and family. We are always trying to raise more funds for our young people for everything from group activities, to helping provide furniture and kitchen essentials for their first home and even Christmas drives to help us be able to give them some semblance of a normal Christmas.

Branching out changes many young people’s lives, here is a testimonial from a previous tenant who lived with us.

Whilst living in residential care, I knew I had to leave the home by the time I turned 18. I knew I would move into Supported Accommodation, and the hunt began to find a suitable placement that would suit my needs and be able to provide me with a personalised support package. Before visiting Kings Road, I visited 2 other placements, and they weren’t suitable. When I came to Kings Road I was instantly introduced to the other tenants and this made me feel welcome. I liked the fact that there was only 9 rooms, and Staff were constantly providing support and interacting with everybody.’

‘Before moving in, Vik (Manager) and the team from where I was living, got together and decided it would be best for me to have a staggered move. This meant I stayed at Kings Road a couple of nights per week to get used to the transition, before formally moving in on my 18th birthday.’

‘Living at Kings Road taught me independent living skills, budgeting skills and how to access services in the community around my emotional wellbeing. I must admit that it was difficult at times, but I persevered and accessed the support around me. It was a good environment, living with Staff onsite. I made friends and continued to go to College in Nottingham. Life was good.

After living in Core accommodation for 6/7 months I had reached a stage where I felt ready and independent enough to move into a Cluster property. I moved into a flat, not far from Kings Road, and settled in really well. It took time for me to get used to my surroundings, but I had a SMaRT emergency call box in my flat if I ever needed help. Staff visit me daily and I am heavily involved in Branching Out Newark and everything that goes on!’

I am proud of how far I have come in the past year and I couldn’t have done it without the support from the Staff at Branching Out Newark.’

This is just one story of how branching out has helped a young person. There are many more! Branching out is like a family we still keep in touch with many pervious tenants and it is amazing to see them become strong independent productive member of society who have truly turned their lives around, we have supported so many over the years in fact our Assistant Manager Jess is a previous Tenant! She became a support worker years after leaving us, she left for a little while to work as a leaving care PA with Nottinghamshire County Council but her heart was always with Branching out and as soon as an opportunity came up she came back as their Assistant Manager.

We are currently trying to raise some funds for a group project we would love to be able to do.

Our first fund raising attempt is to allow us to organise a group activity for our more isolated tenants, we have all struggled with the lock down over the last year but many of the young people we support do not have the support networks around them that most of us have had to help us cope with the national lockdown, and now that restrictions are beginning to lift we would love to be able to get some of them together to have a trip out to allow them to meet each other, build friendships, learn to work as a team and gain confidence in themselves and each other.

We have organised a similar trip a few years ago and all of our young people had an amazing time but this time we would like to be able to take more tenants and give them the opportunity to choose an activity.

Our aim is to raise enough money to allow us to take as many of our young people on a day trip to Sherwood pines. At Sherwood pines there is a host of activities our young people would love to experience from 'go ape' which is a tree top adventure course, the zip wires and the tree top nets adventure course, to the mountain biking and woodland walks. This is a day trip that has something for everyone.

https://goape.co.uk/locations/sherwood-pines

We would like to be able to make a real day of this and plan a picnic and a treasure hunt for after but to do this we need to raise some money!

Each activity for the day costs around £38 per person and we would like to take at least 10 young people if not more. On top of the activities we would like to provide food and transport. We are lucky enough that Sherwood pines is close enough to our main office that we would only need to fund a mini bus for the day.

These group activities really benefit our young people in so many ways, not only does it give them new experiences and the opportunity to meet new people and make friends it helps with their mental health and wellbeing.  We have seen a huge increase in our young people suffering with their mental health over the last 18 months, not only has there been a 60% increase across the country of young people presenting as homeless compared to the year before, on average there has been a 45% increase on safeguarding concerns and almost all of our young people have needed to seek some type of mental health support since the start of the pandemic.

Brad 17 one of our current tenants had this to say about getting to do activities.

‘ I suffer with ADHD, when we have activities to look forward to it helps keep me focused on improving my life, I have struggled with my depression and anger issues even more over lock down and getting to take part in activities helps take my mind off my day to day problems.

A few weeks ago I got the chance to climb Mam Tor with my house mates and other tenants from Retford, it was a great experience, I made some new friends and everyone enjoyed getting out of the house and running around instead of being stuck inside! It was a challenge but once at the top it was worth it and it’s given me confidence to try new things, and the chip butties when we got back to the bottom were the best ever!’

Group activities have great benefits for our young people, team building, learning new skills, confidence building and learning how to plan and manage their time to name just a few.

During lock down we tried to keep our young people busy with theme days, support groups, movie nights and games nights, they would all benefit from a day out where they can have some amazing new experiences and run around like young people should and enjoy some of what they have been missing out on!

This project successfully funded on 21st September 2021