2023 has been a huge year for Ignite Life and the community we support, we have grown as a team to welcome more and more amazing volunteers and staff members and we have expanded our services to better meet new community needs.
Each of our services, counselling, mentoring and food support, have continued to put the young people in our community at the heart of everything we do.
Counselling
This year, we have increased our counselling team to five counsellors which means we can provide more sessions to young people across Bristol and South Gloucestershire. Our counsellors all work out of our centre in Kingswood and use various methods and facilities to provide art, drama, play, and talking therapy.
Since August 2021, we have provided more than 100 young people with between 6-24 counselling sessions.
Mentoring
Ignite has continued to provide essential 1:1 mentoring to young people who may otherwise slip through the net. We work closely with Impact Mentoring to deliver life changing support.
In 2023, we provided around 190 1:1 mentoring sessions, this is 570 hours of youth support.
Food Support
This year, we have had 1470 visits at our food bank and have provided 24,000 meals. We now have 15 volunteers who all help to run our food bank and deliver food parcels to families in the community.
Our food bank works in partnership with many organisations to ensure we all work together to best support our community. This includes Sainsburys, Co-op, Morrisons, FareShare, Asda, and more!
With funding from Hubbub, we were able to put on pumpkin decorating and cooking workshops out of our centre. This was part of their #EatYourPumpkin event which was aiming to reduce pumpkin waste around Halloween time. With the funding, we were able to provide 2 cooking workshops for people in the community who wanted to learn how to cook using pumpkin.
Volunteers
Ignite is made up of a group of amazing, compassionate and committed volunteers.
Some of the young people we provide with mentoring also took part in our food service volunteer schemes which aimed to engage the young people in our food services and encourage community involvement. In the scheme, young people helped us unpack Fareshare food into the food bank, communicate with volunteers, create social media posts for our Instagram, pick up surplus pet food from pets at home, and gain a general understanding of the workings of a charity.
In 2023 we put on 2 volunteering events for our amazing volunteers! We held a volunteer social at the local Fed café in Fishponds inFebruary where volunteers all met and we discussed the future of Ignite. In November, we also held a volunteer ‘thank you’ event at Porto lounge inFishponds to say a huge thank you to all our volunteers who have been dedicated to Ignite and passionate about the cause since they first started. A big thank you to both these places for hosting us, it was massively appreciated.
Youth Group
In September 2023, Ignite Life launched a new youth group aimed at supporting young people who, due to additional needs or challenges, wouldn't access traditional youth groups.
This group was youth led and each week the young people chose their activities the following week. We were able to run the group for 15 weeks and the young people took part in cooking, crafts, pic nics, movie days, bowling, and more!
We are hoping to fundraise further and make this a more permanent feature of the Ignite services.
Sailing
In July 2023, Ignite Life took a group of 5 young people on a life changing sailing adventure with the Island Trust. After months of planning, organising, and fundraising our team of 5 amazing young people and 4youth workers travelled down to Plymouth Yacht Haven for our 5-night trip.
It was tough and extremely challenging at times but the way each young person pushed through their own difficulties, helped one another, and showed outstanding resilience was a joy to watch and be a part of.
2024...
We have big plans for 2024, all which continue to place young people at the heart of everything! This includes a new trauma-informed parenting workshop, recipe boxes for those in food poverty, youth internships, newsletters and more.
Thank you
Thank you to everyone who has dedicated their time to support Ignite. Thank you to our amazing team of volunteers who show dedication and compassion in everything they do. Thank you to everyone who has donated to our services; every penny goes towards creating safe and accessible spaces for young people to thrive. Thank you to every organisation, funder, and person who has believed in what Ignite does.
