Across our organisation we’re focused on outcomes and driven by insight. We’re clear about the huge benefits of involving the next generation in our current work and future plans, and we also recognise the risks of failing to engage them.
To write our strategy for engaging more young people in our work, we looked at three things.
A child’s background and location impacts on their wellbeing, from early years to school and beyond. Disadvantaged young people achieve poorer career outcomes, and are less likely to have access to advice and experiences of work.
Thanks to the breadth of our work, and the scale of our waterway network, we’re ideally placed to help young people overcome these challenges.
We worked with a market research company to survey around 2,000 young people aged 16 to 24. This gave us valuable insight into their concerns and interests. It helped us to understand more about what the younger generation is looking for from a volunteering opportunity.
You can read the results of this survey in the information section below.
We thought about the work we want to do and recognised that getting young people involved will help us to reach more diverse communities, open up new opportunities with partner organisations for a more sustainable future, raise awareness of our brand, promote the wellbeing benefits of our waterways in new ways, and much, much more.
The following long-term strategic objectives have been agreed by our trustees. By 2025:
Find out more about what we've achieved recently working alongside young people.
A summary of the results of our youth volunteering survey 2019
Full results of our youth volunteering survey 2019
Last date edited: 17 December 2020