We are a radically youth-led charity advocating for local youth forums and young people engaged in youth participation and advocacy at a local level.

Legal form

Non-profit organization

Objectives

Our objective is to advocate for and support local youth forums – groups led by young people (aged 12-26), which aim to understand and advocate for the views of young people within the local area in which they are based – and where no such groups exist, advocate for and support their development. Our remit for this objective is Scotland and other parts of the UK.

Main Activities

We are currently in the process of implementing three main activities: an assessment of current practices and support of local youth forums, the development of a report detailing potential frameworks and improvements that could be made, and providing small grants to help facilitate and foster local youth participation. All these activities will be initially conducted in Scotland.

Strengths

Some of our key strengths are:

• We’re ‘radically youth-led’ – ALYVE UK is entirely led by its Board, a group of young people under the age of 26, with experience in a wide array of youth participation. Every decision – including legal, financial, and governance-related aspects of our work – is made by us, and our main activities and work are informed directly from our knowledge of real issues that young people face at a local level.
• We limit our core-costs – ALYVE UK tries to direct as much of our funding to our charitable aims as possible. This means we meet online or in public spaces as much as possible, and we don’t employ any full-time staff, among other things.
• We’re outcome focused – the first word in our name is Action, and that’s for good reason. As an organisation we have all experienced the frustration of waiting for pre-existing entities to better advocate for and support local youth forums, and ALYVE UK represents young people taking action into our own hands. We try to frame all of our activities in the context of how they can directly benefit our charitable aims.

Finance and Main Partners

ALYVE UK was initiated as a project by the UK’s Youth Delegate to the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe in 2019, as part of the Congress’ Rejuvenating Politics’ initiative. ALYVE UK receives support – but not funding or financial contributions – from the Congress over the period between its two sessions in 2019 (the 36th and 37th sessions).

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