Mentoring centres around creating nurturing relationships where young people can thrive. We build self-esteem and confidence to support young people to reach their potential.
Mentoring provides young people with access to activities such as sport and fitness, cooking skills, creative outlets, work experiences, and trades skills such as plastering and brick laying.
Mentoring supports young people with social interactions in safe spaces where social skills can be developed. We also provide 1:1 educational and employment support and volunteer placements.
1:1 mentoring allows young people to build relationships with safe adults, allowing them to access new meaningful and positive opportunities. Our mentors are experienced and comprehensively trained to support those most vulnerable.
Our mentoring includes:
Mentoring happens either out in the community or in our centre which has an industrial Kitchen, CrossFit gym, pottery studio, bike workshop, construction area, art area, and 5 classrooms.
Ignite has newly launched a service called 'Talking Therapy' where our senior mentors have advanced training in listening skills with our clinical supervisor.
Talking therapy (or listening support) can help young people to learn to cope with emotions and challenges. It is a form of support which helps young people explore feelings in a safe space with a trusted adult who will listen, guide and signpost where needed.
Talking therapy can help with feelings of loneliness, depression, anxiety, support with relationships, school worries and strong emotions. Talking therapy is not counselling but will create a similar safe and trusted space for young people to open up and receive support.
We provide a safe and accessible space for young people and families to learn how to cope with strong emotions and trauma.
Our counselling aims to have a long-lasting positive impact. We aim to provide young people and families with a tool kit they can draw from to help manage future crisis.
Counselling provides young people and families with vital mental-health support, helping them to build resilience and overcome challenges and traumas.
Ignite runs a 1:1 counselling service for young people who, too often, slip through the net due to social disadvantage or being marginalised. We offer a safe space for young people to explore emotions and past traumas or challenges with a professional counsellor.
Our 1:1 counselling is carried out at our centre in Kingswood, either in our classrooms, in the kitchen while cooking, or in our Thrive room with sand play, art therapy or playing games.
We can also offer free CrossFit classes with CrossFit Strong Confident Kind at our centre in Kingswood.
Our family support counselling is offered to families, of any makeup, to help forge strong and healthy relationships, overcome challenges, and address mental health care. We offer positive and meaningful experiences for families to engage with while having professional counselling.
Strong family relationships, between parents, carers, and grandparents, help young people create safe relationships later in life, forge resilience and help families work together to overcome challenges.
We can also offer free family CrossFit classes with CrossFit Strong Confident Kind at our centre in Kingswood.
Both our food delivery support service and food bank help to alleviate the burden of food poverty. Food poverty can negatively impact physical and mental health as well as social wellbeing.
Our food delivery services supports families in our local community and surrounding areas. We want to remove the stigma of asking for help and connect the community with our food bank.
Our food service has supported families with emergency care. We have provided items such as ovens, fridges as well as food parcels and food vouchers. Our food bank also provides toiletries, cleaning products and sanitary items.
Since the start of the pandemic, Ignite Life has been providing weekly food parcels to families in food poverty. We are able to provide consistent support to families who may have transport barriers or mental health challenges and struggle leaving their homes.
We have teamed up with Fare Share, Sainsburys, and Morrisons to provide families in our community with food and essential items.
Ignite has an amazing team of volunteers who help to package up the food parcels each week in our food bank and then deliver them out to local families and who help run the food bank.
In August 2022, Ignite Life opened a food bank on Staple Hill High Street. This was to respond to the growing demand for food support due the cost-of-living crisis.
We are run on volunteer support to keep the food bank open as often as possible, check out the calendar to see the opening days and times for this week.
Our food bank was also created to be able to provide volunteer opportunities for the young people we mentor and provide counselling to. Many of the young people we support are not in education and struggle with extreme anxiety, we are able to provide a 6 week volunteer program where young people, with their trusted mentor, can learn social skills, work experience, and give back to their community.
Get in touch with us today.
Whether you are a young person needing support, you are a family member or carer, you support a young person or family, or you want to get involved in any way, get in contact with us!
Sign up to our newsletter here!