Each month, ELBA shines a spotlight on one of our community partners. This month we are focusing on UpRising Leadership, a UK wide youth leadership organisation that supports young people from a diversity of backgrounds to reach their potential and transform the world around them.

What is the name of your charity?
UpRising Leadership

What does your charity do?
UpRising is a UK-wide youth leadership development organisation. Our mission is to open pathways to power for talented young people from diverse backgrounds. We equip them with the knowledge, networks, skills, and confidence to fulfil their leadership potential, find new opportunities and transform the world around them through social action.

Founded in East London in 2008, UpRising now runs programmes across the UK including Cardiff, Greater Manchester, West Midlands, Bedford and Luton, and London. We have also had programmes run in Liverpool and Stoke on Trent.

Our programmes include a nine month Leadership Programme and Environmental Leadership Programme, providing skills and knowledge sessions with some of the UK’s most senior social and environmental leaders. Young people also create a social action campaign on a local issue of their choice, with previous topics ranging from air pollution to mental health amongst young black men.

Our other programmes include Fastlaners, our employability programme for talented yet underemployed or unemployed young people; Find Your Power / Voice, a high-impact short course designed to empower young people to have a voice through the creation of a campaigning film; and One Million Mentors, a project aiming to train, recruit and connect a million mentors to a million young people in the UK. UpRising also runs activities to encourage involvement in the democratic process.

What challenges are there in east London with regards to the issues that your service users face?
One of the main issues that the young people that we work with face in East London, as well as the other areas we work in, is that they are not properly represented in traditional services. The challenge for many of them is that many lack the knowledge, skills and networks to be able to break this cycle.

Our programme that focus on developing the knowledge, skills, networks and confidence of our participants in order to open up pathways to leadership.

Do you have an inspirational story/moment about your work such as a case study that you would like to share?
Here is what one UpRiser said about her experience on our programme in 2018:

“I was born and raised in East London in a working class Bangladeshi family. Growing up I did not really have that many role models around me to look up to academically, but I was always filled with this sense of justice. Especially because of the rise of Islamophobia during the 90s, ongoing racism and the sexism prevalent in my community. Before UpRising I was working part time in retail. I had just graduated and was trying to find a job that I wanted to do where I was really involved in the fight for social justice. I was primarily looking at work in the charity sector and I ideally wanted to break into policy and research. However, I realised then how hard it was breaking into this sector for people like me – I didn’t really have much prior experience as I thought that if I focussed on my studies it would be enough. It wasn’t and pretty soon I ended up going mostly full time into the retail job that I was in part time during my studies to support myself.

UpRising gave me the confidence to leave a job that I was not happy in and really motivated me into pursuing a career in what I am passionate about. More importantly it gave me networks in the fields of work that I want to be in. Now I don’t feel like I’m stuck in the mud or as if I don’t know where I’m going, I have direction now. I know I have people I can rely on for advice, like my mentor and alumni of the leadership programme doing work in the field that I want to get involved in. I literally would not have met these people if it wasn’t for UpRising.

UpRising has given me the skills that I lacked before. I might have made up excuses before like “Oh that’s wrong and I want to do something about it but I don’t know how to get started”, well now I know. I know about things like how to create a theory of change etc. Importantly, along with the confidence of leadership there’s another form of confidence – worth. Now if I see something I want to get involved in, I know I have something to offer in the form of my leadership training and training around public speaking etc. I now know my worth and how to get involved in a project whereas before I might have doubted myself and hesitated.”

What are the current challenges that your organisation is facing?
One of the biggest challenges that we face in delivering our programmes is in expanding our network of stakeholders to match the needs of our programmes and participants. We are constantly looking for organisations who are able to provide us venues, speakers and mentors to support our programme.

Of course, as a small charity, fundraising is also something that we are constantly working on, as we look for ways to continue to develop and grow our programmes.