Emily’s Story – World Storytelling Day 2022

Emily is a 20 year-old young person with Cerebral Palsy. Due to her condition, she has a significant degree of physical disability which means she spends long periods of time in a wheelchair, but in spite of this she is upbeat and is always up for a challenge.

When the pandemic hit and we were all expected to stay at home, Emily felt more isolated than most and missed the face-to-face contact that gave her a social outlet. Then, after months of staying at home and Zoom calls, when restrictions finally began to ease, the opportunity arose for Emily to take part in our Outdoor Activators programme through her local youth organisations, Young Leicestershire. Emily leapt at the opportunity to get involved.

Emily joined the Busy Bus Scheme with a group of other young volunteers, all with a wide range of disability. Through this scheme, she and the team planned, prepared and delivered a range of physical outdoor activities to various groups of young people around the county, travelling via the Busy Bus with all the equipment they needed.

Emily helped to deliver games and activities to three groups at two different youth clubs. One of these was a group of young people with disabilities, and another was a group of young people in their local park as a detached programme. In total, she delivered an incredible 6 days of face-to-face activities.

This experience of volunteering with other young people had a huge impact on Emily. Her confidence grew day on day and she was so engrossed with the young people that she barely noticed that she was spending more time out of her chair than in.

Emily’s mum told us the impact that the programme had on her:

“Emily had the best time, in fact she’s decided now that she wants to study childcare at college because she enjoyed working with the kids so much. I’m so proud of her.” 

Her youth worker, Deborah, shared how Emily and the group found this experience:

“Emily clearly had the best time doing Outdoor Activators – the photos bear that out -and we are all looking forward to doing more of the same this summer as all of the volunteers have the ‘let’s get young people active’ bug!”
Deborah – Youth Worker, Young Leicestershire

Keep your eyes peeled for the Young Leicestershire Busy Bus…

Outdoor Activators was a 3 year programme that inspired young people to lead quality social action projects that benefited their local community and developed their own life skills. This was achieved through outdoor physical activity and a connection to the natural environment.

It targeted young people aged between 12 and 20, who had not volunteered with similar projects before, faced personal barriers and may have low wellbeing due to their experience of those personal barriers. These young people may have been previously reluctant to get involved in volunteering due to any combination of the following reasons: lack of access, lack of opportunity, lack of knowledge, and personal circumstances.

The programme was funded by the Sport England Potentials Fund – Outdoors, overseen by UK Youth and delivered locally through three delivery partners in Newcastle & Northumberland, Coventry and Leicestershire.

614 young people were engaged across the programme between 2019 and 2021. Below are our key learnings from the past three years of delivering the Outdoor Activators programme.