Awards - Community Champions

The RESPECT Team

This group of dynamic young people aged 16 to 25 are 'peer educators' striving to make a change amongst their community. Working on a voluntary basis they are trained to deliver positive messages about sex and relationships and run a drop-in clinic managed by themselves.

The project was born through a group who became parents at a young age, not helped by poor sexual education in schools. They set up RESPECT, trained and applied for funding, and built the project to the success it is today.

The team run workshops across three boroughs and are part of wider programme called Young Peoples Project. This summer they wrote a drug awareness programme currently being piloted across three boroughs. They have also started weapons training with a view to writing a peer education programme on the subject.

Burntwood School Envision Team

This team of 6th form students from Burntwood School, Tooting, tackle prejudice and stereotyping in their school and wider community. They have set up a forum between their school and local police to challenge a huge mistrust of the police in their community that they realised was very damaging to community relations.

This project led the team (that includes Muslim girls) to look at the preconceptions surrounding women wearing the hijab and the way they are treated, holding a ‘hijab challenge’ and raising money in the process for the Iraqi Orphanage Foundation. They have held student debates about the attitudes towards the hijab and are now in discussion with a Pakastani TV station regarding the possibility of making a documentary of their experiences.

Ascension Eagles Senior Coed Team

Hailed from the London borough of Newham, Ascension Eagles Senior Coed team are the only team in the World to have retained a national cheerleading title for over a decade.

These young athletes are remarkable in that they invest their time and talent in helping other young people progress in the sport, volunteering a minimum of two hundred hours annually and earning their professional coaching qualifications. This year the team turned down the chance to represent England in the World Championships to instead raise resources to help more London youth progress in the sport.

What makes this programme so successful is that it is run by young people for young people and they learn and teach how to transfer their skills into other parts of their lives.