By Jesse, Digital and Communications Coordinator
The Big Give Christmas Challenge is the UK’s biggest collaborative fundraising campaign, championing charities and giving them the opportunity to make an even bigger difference. The campaign uses a pledge model, which offers participating charities the opportunity to double their donations with match funding. Peer Power Youth saw this as an incredible opportunity to raise funds as we believe that every young person deserves to realise their dreams and live their best life regardless of their upbringing.
The campaign’s goal was to raise money to support young people with childhood trauma into employment through our Peer to Professional scheme. Young people are provided with workshops to develop their soft skills and increase their knowledge on areas such as financial literacy, public speaking, and networking to support them into education or work. This was Peer Power Youth’s first ever campaign, and allowed us to explore different sources of income, as we are a small charity that relies on Trusts and Foundations.
A Star is Bjorn took the stage at The Bedford, Balham with a superb performance, rivalling the original dancing queens. The event was a success with us raising £1190 in ticket sales, plus donations on the night. The classic hits plus audience participation created an amazing atmosphere with a real sense of community. Thank you to The Bedford Pub and A Star is Bjorn, who kindly didn’t charge us for their services, so we could focus on reaching our fundraising target.
We also used this as an opportunity to sell merchandise with 5 designs that relate to our values as an organisation. The total profit from merchandise was £775.35, and this played a huge part of us reaching our target. This profit was from t-shirts, tote bags, notebooks and stickers, covering a variety of prices to suit everybody’s personal budgets.
The Peer Power Youth team did what they could to support donations, including participating in challenge events. Although the nature of event was decided by each participant, the many of them related to the number 12 (or any of its variations such as 12, 122), which built the purpose of our campaign. Before Young partners join us, just 12% are in employment, education or training, but within 6 months with us this rises to 93%.
“It felt very nice to cook my favourite Spanish dish, share my cuisine with my neighbours and get them engaged with the work we do at Peer Power Youth. Definitely not the last time I am going to be doing this!” – Ro, Fundraising Manager
The teams challenge events included: reading 1222 pages, cooking 12 Spanish dishes, running a half marathon, walking a dog for 12 miles, sprinkling around 12 acts of kindness, and running 12 pro-bono coaching sessions.
The main objective of our communications was to showcase the impact of our core project and the success stories of young people who have taken part. By posting a variety of quotes, images, videos and graphics daily, we were able to feature the team and trustees to appeal to larger networks. The highlights of this campaign were reaching 755 accounts on LinkedIn and 5382 accounts on TikTok. The engagement around this content helped build a buzz for the ABBA event.
Thanks to the generous donations, we raised a total of £3743, which was doubled in pledges to make £7,586,69. Exceeding our target of our first ever campaign by 105% is huge for us, and we couldn’t have done it without you! We will be participating in the 2025 Big Give Christmas Challenge, so watch this space. Supporting young people to create brighter futures helps create both individual and system change, inspiring the next generation.
About Peer Power Youth
Peer Power Youth is a national charity supporting young people aged 13-25, who have dealt with childhood trauma. They have been affected by abuse, exclusion or violence impacting their communities, and have experience in health, youth justice and care services.
The young people that we work with have described themselves as being ‘abandoned by society’. Despite their circumstances, we see their power and potential. We do vital work to support these young people in their journey and improve the youth justice and care services they were once in for the benefit of other young peers. That’s why we focus on both individual change and system change.
Our Individual change work – We offer young people support in training, education, professional experience and promote positive wellbeing.
Our System change work – We work with young people to create real change for others in health, justice and social services.
Keep up with the latest on empathy, co-production and youth-led system change.
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