London Youth City Leaders

Young people at Dragon Hall have been introduced to a new funding programme by London Youth called City Leaders Programme. A group of 10 young people aged 12-15 have used this to fundraise for their club and community over the last 8 months.

The City Leaders Project is built up into 4 stages, ‘Your Team’, ‘Your Club’,’Your Community’’ and the final stage ‘The City Leaders’

For ‘Team Leaders’, young people work together to run a group activity and learn about teamwork. Dragon Hall’s young people chose to go for a meal as a team to develop relationships for the coming stages, this proved to be very productive as young people got to choose roles and responsibilities for each other.

At ‘Club Leaders’, young people develop and lead a project to improve their youth club.
Dragon Hall’s young people chose to run a cake sale to generate funding for their weekly clubs. The group also had to plan and prepare a presentation for a panel consisting of London youth leaders, were the group were awarded £400 for their project.

At the ‘Community Leaders’ stage young people design their own project to have a positive impact on the community. They pitch for the resources and support needed to deliver the project at a Dragon’s Den style ‘Community Challenge’ events with City of London partners. The group chose to work on a homeless shelter day partnering with St Mungo’s and Bloomsbury Baptist church who specialize in work with homeless people. Young people presented at the Vanqis Building to a panel and were awarded £600 to run their project.

The final stage, called ‘City Leaders’, then works with a group of 24 young people from across London who’ve shown the greatest commitment through the Team, Club and Community Leaders stages of the programme. Dragon Hall will pick 1 young person from the group to join these 24 young people. The leader will take part in a three month leadership programme tailored to their needs and designed to help them learn about power and influence in London, understand themselves and how to work with others better and develop project planning skills through running their own projects.