About us

“Young Roots is the place to make you the person who can change the world for the better. It's for me a second family.” - young refugee we work with

 

Our Vision

A world where all young refugees and asylum seekers realise their rights and fulfil their potential.

Our Mission

To work alongside young people and support them to improve their wellbeing and life chances.

Our Values

  • Young Roots will involve young refugees and asylum seekers, and others who are ‘experts by their experience’, at all levels of the organisation. We will have a human rights and asset-based approach, and prioritise youth participation and leadership.

  • Young Roots will develop our approach to diversity, equity and inclusion throughout the organisation, consciously recognising and working to rectify inherent inequity within our society and how this manifests itself at Young Roots. We will particularly work to ensure representation amongst staff, trustees, volunteers and facilitators.

  • Young Roots welcomes all young refugees and asylum seekers from anywhere in the world, irrespective of religion, sexual orientation, disability, gender, race, religion and belief. We strive to address inequity faced by young people based on their identity.

  • Young Roots promotes collaboration and working in partnership with relevant organisations in order to provide the best possible services, activities and projects.

  • Young Roots aims for excellence and best quality in all that we do, valuing responsiveness, understanding, respect, responsibility, creativity, knowledge, participation and kindness.

  • Young Roots values staff and volunteer wellbeing and strives to provide a working environment that will allow the development of a diverse team to deliver their best work.

Young Roots’ history

Young Roots is proud of our history, and our values and ethos have developed from the early work of our founders.

2004 - Our start

Young Roots was founded in 2004 as Refugee Youth Project by Roz Evans, Rachel Yarrow and Kathy Brook. They established the charity with the aim of supporting refugee children and other young refugees in the UK and internationally. They had worked on an education project the Al Bass refugee camp in Lebanon and returned to the UK determined to raise money to continue the work they had started.

From this seed the Refugee Youth Project was established, and sure enough, they achieved their ambition and returned to Lebanon the following summer to run the project. From the beginning, the charity was focused on understanding from young people themselves the interventions that were most useful and needed. These principles of youth participation, research-based action and ensuring a human rights based approach have guided the charity throughout its history.

We became a UK registered charity in January 2011, and after a consultation with young people changed our name to Young Roots in September 2014. Over time our work developed, and new projects took place.

Together with our trusted partners in Lebanon, The Sour Community Disability Project (SCDP), we delivered high quality educational and social activities to 90-100 young people each year, with clear positive impacts on their development and wellbeing. In 2023, following an external review of the Lebanon project as part of our ongoing focus on strengthening our governance, trustees at Young Roots took the difficult decision to end our funding of the project. We are proud of and grateful for the eleven years of partnership between Young Roots and SCDP.

2006 - London 

Young Roots first started working in Barnet, London in 2006 responding to the needs of Whitefield School where there were a high proportion of young refugees. In 2012, we were one of the first organisations to recognise the needs of young refugees in Croydon. We conducted a needs assessment and then successfully applied fpr our first Big Lottery grant and began our Bridging London Project in March 2013. This project provided youth activities and supported refugee, asylum seeking and migrant young people aged 11-21 years in the London boroughs of Barnet, Brent and Croydon. In 2016, with a second grant from the Big Lottery, we established our flagship Casework Service to work one-to-one with young refugees and asylum seekers. Thanks to support from Children in Need, Lloyds Foundation and Paul Hamlyn Foundation, we were able to deepen our presence in Croydon and Brent, and appoint our first Director.

Roz Evans remained a much valued Senior Caseworker until 2021, and is still involved with the charity today.

2007 - Nepal 

In 2007-8 we began a project in Nepal with young person-led research focused on Bhutanese refugees who had arrived in Nepal in the early 1990s fleeing political conflict following the Bhutanese government’s ‘one nation, one people’ policy.  This research found that some children in the camps, such as those without parents, or with parents who are elderly, disabled or ill, experienced difficulties receiving adequate support and finding time to focus on studies.  A large resettlement programme began in 2008, through which thousands have found new homes in the USA, Canada, Australia and other countries (including a small number the UK). However, for the remaining refugees, the situation became increasingly difficult with fewer social support networks in place and diminished capacity to provide camp services. 

Between 2012 - 2019, we have provided funding for our delivery partners to provide training and activities to Nepali and refugee children to improve relations and to create opportunities for them to advocate for their rights within their local communities. 

2011 - Manchester 

Following on from our project supporting refugee children in Nepal, in 2011 we facilitated a participatory filmmaking project with a group of young Bhutanese refugees who had recently been resettled to Greater Manchester.

2012 - Egypt 

In 2012, we worked in partnership with a grassroots organisation called Children’s Cooperative to facilitate a young person-led research project. This explored refugee and Egyptian children’s experiences of education in Cairo.