Camelot Foundation

Charity Awards

'Finding the hidden leaders'

Last year a group of young people came up with a revolutionary idea for updating grant making schemes they would replace boring application forms with video applications.

The 18 young people, aged between 14 and 23, had been brought together by the Foundation to be create and run the first ever 4front Awards, designed to recognise young leaders all over the UK and present them with £3,000 to turn their ideas for making a difference to their communities into reality.

Susan Elizabeth, chief executive of the Camelot Foundation, says: We target disadvantaged young people and one of the ways of assessing applicants is looking for youth leadership. We decided that we needed to practise what we preached. Although funding and awards programmes that are concerned with youth leadership already exist, Elizabeth says that these focus on high achieving young people, those who are going to make it anyway and young people were rarely given a central leadership role.

All of the young people in the 4front Awards team had experienced some form of disadvantage such as being in care, involved in street prostitution or self-harm. Elizabeth says: "We wanted to say there is leadership potential in these young people too and if you work with them properly it will emerge. For some of these young people the experience was literally life changing.

She adds: We've proved the charitable foundations can work in new and different ways. We can meet our objectives in how we do the work as well as what we give money to.

Susan Elizabeth
Chief executive
University House
11-13 Lower Grosvenor Place
London
SW1W 0EX
020 7828 6085
Reg no.1060606
http://www.camelotfoundation.org.uk/

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