How we work

Our members work with over 3,500 local youth clubs across the UK. Our members are umbrella youth organisations in cities and counties and countries throughout the UK.  We support them to provide the best possible services and opportunities for young people.

Our office in London coordinates our work, influences government and other key decision-makers to make the right choices for youth clubs, and develops crucial resources.

Involving young people in how we work is really important to us. 60 young people from our membership came to our Say Something event to tell us what they thought about our work, how we are run and what our plans should be. They helped shape our new three-year strategy.

Our impact: 2011 highlights

We monitor our impact closely, so we can show our supporters, funders and donors that investing in us makes a difference to young people. We also like to know what we’re doing well – and what isn’t working, so we can improve.

In fact, we recently invested in a new system to monitor our impact, called VIEWS. This will help us and our members collect evidence of our good work.

Here is just a taste of Ambition’s successes this year:

• We helped our members secure £2 million of funding, which they’ll use to deliver new opportunities for young people in their local areas.
• Over 750 youth club leaders and volunteers completed an Ambition training programme, giving them the skills to run their club excellently.
• Thousands of young people from youth clubs have benefitted from taking part in an Ambition programme, having fun and improving their skills. Nearly 2,000 took part in our sports programmes, 500 girls took part in our dance event, 1,000 young people got involved in our arts and environmental initiatives and 1,000 had the chance to volunteer through our programmes.
• We achieved ILM (Institute of Leadership and Management) Centre status so we can continue to grow and develop our training programmes.
• We raised MPs’ awareness of the importance of youth clubs with a parliamentary event to celebrate the achievements of our three-year emotional well-being project. The project highlighted the unique role of youth clubs in supporting young people’s mental health, developed resources and training for youth workers and shared effective practice.