SINCE 2008 Inner Flame has been giving disaffected and demotivated young people the belief that they have a place in the world and helping them discover their potential.

So successful has its work been in Swindon it has been asked to expand it across the rest of Wiltshire to help hundreds of the county’s young people suffering from the after-effects of the pandemic find their way back into normality.

The charity supports young people on the margins of education, training and employment who are referred to it by job centres, council services and housing associations. Most have either lost their way or are suffering from uncertainty, self-doubt, depression or a lack of self-esteem.

The 12-week Prince’s Trust Team programme takes young people who have become isolated and discouraged and helps them to build their self-esteem, shape their thinking about their future and develop confidence in their ability not just to focus on a project but to work with others.

The early part of the course can be the toughest, breaking down barriers and bringing people out of themselves. This is helped by a second-week residential course where the young people are taken away to try new things while learning how to work with others. It allows them to break away from their situation and sample activities like canoeing, climbing and raft-building to widen their horizons and instil confidence.

Over the three months they undertake community projects such as painting or gardening for a charity, find work experience, develop their CV and focus on what they want to do with their lives.

“The early part of the course is about self-discovery and finding that they belong somewhere,” said Inner Flame’s general manager Elizabeth Postgate. “Helping your community out links you into that community and gives you a sense of belonging and self-worth so it is really important.”

“At the end of it they put together a presentation in front of family and friends about their experience, it’s a wonderful process to look back and at that point they realise how far they have come.”

Young people get support beyond the course but some have come back and volunteered with the charity, using what they have learned to help run its other courses.

Ms Postgate said: “One course member was saying that when they started the Team programme last year and said by the end of the programme they knew that they wanted to go into teaching so they enrolled on a level three teaching programme and has been volunteering with us.

“They very quickly started delivering one of our shorter courses with us and now they are potentially going to become a team leader and run the longer programme.”

That course member told staff: “To be brutally honest, if it wasn't for Team I don't think I would be here right now; in this job or even in the world. I am so grateful for the nagging to stay on Team because now I'm in a place where I can see my future.”

Ms Postgate said: “They might have found another path but they didn’t know how to. They just needed that little something to get them back and reassure them that their life was valuable.”

Even before the pandemic Inner Flame had been looking more closely at young people’s mental health. “We were finding that young people were coming to us with more and more severe mental health issues so we put into place the bones of a mental health programme and were about to launch it when Covid hit,” said Ms Postgate. ”We had to change what we were going to do.”

The eight-week Manage Anxiety: Your Way course switched online, as did the Team. Both featured some face-to-face meetings when restrictions allowed. “We were able to work with the young people according to their needs, either face to face or online,” said Ms Postgate. “We definitely had three or four young people complete the course who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to.”

The courses have been so successful some of the dozens of young people have returned as volunteers and are helping to run courses themselves.

Feedback from the young people who complete all the courses is evidence of their effectiveness. “One young man who is now volunteering with us was talking to a group and they were listening to him intently,” said Ms Postgate. “Afterwards he told me ‘no one has ever listened to me like that before, I had always been told that I was worthless and useless’.

“He was ecstatic that people were listening to him and he felt that he had something to give.”

Inner Flame runs the courses from its base at the Shaftesbury Centre in Rodbourne but, after a request from The Prince’s Trust, it is beginning them at Trowbridge Town Hall from September – helping young people from west Wiltshire as well as from the Chippenham, Calne and Devizes areas.

A £15,000 grant from Wiltshire Community Foundation’s Wiltshire and Swindon Coronavirus Response and Recovery Fund will help fund the expansion, as well as the some of the costs of the mental health courses.

Ms Postgate said the community foundation grant was a vital intervention after its revenue from the Prince’s Trust Programme, which comes from the government via a partnership with New College in Swindon, was badly affected by a drop in enrolments during the pandemic.

The charity, which needs £236,000 a year to run, has to fundraise at last £10,000 every year to make up the difference in income after its £152,000 for education funding and £74,000 from trusts and grants like those it has received from Wiltshire Community Foundation.

“The funding has helped us to get over that bump because the income from the short courses was nothing like that we get from the Team Programme,” she said. “What it enabled us to do is to keep people employed and thinking of the future and it meant we could carry on the work that we have been doing with young people.”

To find out more about Inner Flame, go to innerflame.org.uk