After an interview with Vanessa Newey and Jean Templeton of St Basils, the team, named Group T, consisting of students Elliot Moran, Rosie Harris, Daisy Sarton, Sophia Bengtsson-Wheeler and Crystal Chan, worked hard to achieve an ambitious target of over £2,000 and produce a helpful research report on their findings.
The money donated will be used by St Basils to secure educational opportunities for young people through transport schemes and access to technology, such as laptops. Group T also influenced a local philanthropist organisation to match the donation, bringing the total to over £4,000.
Further to this, the students worked with us to inspire positive change to our educational offerings to young people accessing our services.
We spoke to Rosie Harris, one of the Group members at University of Birmingham:
“As part of our degree, we were asked to research a social issue, so we decided to look at youth homelessness in Birmingham which lead us to St Basils. We had to campaign to create long term change- develop a pitch, do the research and actually go out there and campaign. We created a full research report, which we have shared with St Basils to help with their policies.
Being a part of Birmingham University, we were specifically interested in educational inequality in young, disadvantaged people. From our research, we advised St Basils to change the donations page on their website, asking for more educational materials to be donated. This lead to a big increase in those materials being donated, which has positively impacted the education young people receive at St Basils.
We began to fundraise through social media (with Instagram being the most successful platform) for St Basils, asking friends, family and the general public alike to come together for a common goal- we even went door to door in our local community to fundraise and tell our story. A local charitable company agreed to match our donations, so we ended up raising £4,200 in total.
It was really fulfilling doing something we all found important and achieving that goal. We really went for it, and that resulted in genuinely influenced change and vital funds raised. We really believed in it and it was amazing to see real results of our work- we really felt like we were helping our community.”
Jane Templeton, Chief Executive of St Basils, said “This is an amazing piece of work and hugely helpful to us in so many ways. Thank you for providing us with the opportunity to contribute and enable the experience of young people to be heard. The fact you have gone on to fundraise for our work is just amazing and we can’t thank you enough.”
We want to sincerely thank Group T for their hard work, dedication, and tenacity in working toward real change for the young people of the West Midlands!
You can see Group T’s Research Report here.