Ms Dearbhla Holohan:

We thank the committee for the invitation to address it. We are delighted to be able to attend to share the work of our Strive partnership with the committee. I am Dearbhla Holohan, from the lead partner, Include Youth. Deborah Watters is from Northern Ireland Alternatives. Mary Nolan is from Newstart Education Centre. Tony Silcock is from Youth Initiatives. Our fifth partner, Lifford-Clonleigh Resource Centre is not present today, but we will ensure that its valuable contribution is given adequate mention during the course of the afternoon. Ahead of today’s, meeting we provided the committee with background information to the Strive programme, including an independent evaluation with detailed analysis of the types of interventions used and key achievements to date. To summarise, Strive was one of 11 Peace4Youth programmes supported by the special EU programmes body, with match funding from the Irish Government and the Northern Ireland Executive.

From our launch in late 2017, to the recent completion of the project in March 2022, a total of 837 young people completed the programme. The overall project value was almost €4 million and 28 staff were employed across Northern Ireland and County Donegal. Many of the areas that we have worked in are underserved by opportunities for young people to participate in youth work activities and some have spent long periods of time without any services. For example, before Strive became operational in the Lifford area, there had been no youth provision there for nine years.

Strive builds the capacity and skills of young people, decreases the risk of them becoming involved in paramilitarism or anti-community activity and it helps address educational underachievement by supporting young people to remain in education. It also addresses key issues relating to mental health, suicide, identity and understanding "the other", thus promoting a shared society and peacebuilding. Strive provides young people with a voice, develops skills and promotes leadership. It helps young people to shape policy decisions and legislation and ensures young people have a say in key debates and platforms. As a youth-led programme, young people who are expert by experience, having come through similar situations, use their experience to lead on design and delivery across the programme sites. They work in partnership with skilled and experienced youth workers to support and encourage programme participants to take the lead in setting the agenda for the programme and to look to the needs of their wider community and how they could help to address them.

In addition to the planned outcomes of the programme, there was a myriad of unexpected outcomes from our work, some of which were provided by the Covid pandemic, which none of us could have foreseen. The way in which our youth workers swiftly mobilised to support our participants with a variety of creative and effective interventions was inspiring, to say the least, and reinforced the necessity and value of the programme to our young people. Consistent feedback from young people has been that they want to engage with Strive over a longer period. To this end, we implore funding bodies to focus on the value of nurturing relationships, reflecting on distance travelled, and to adopt an approach that allow for it to take as long as it takes, without restrictive time constraints.

Delivery under Peace IV demonstrated that the programme works for mixed ability groups through supporting young people with a range of complex needs, learning and physical disabilities and behavioural issues to partake in our inclusive programme. In addition to the leadership opportunities offered through our expert by experience approach, young people from Strive acted as advisory groups for impactful academic research projects. In partnership with a member of our steering group, Dr. Siobhan McAlister, and her colleagues at Queen’s University Belfast, young people examined issues such as the transgenerational impact of the conflict and the nature of violence in our society.

The committee has been provided with both the summary and youth versions of the report entitled It Didn’t End in 1998: Examining the Impacts of Conflict Legacy Across Generations, to which our young people were key contributors.

Strive proved particularly effective when we partnered with schools to target those who were most at risk of disengaging with the education system. We believe the programme has a role to play in tackling educational underachievement and early school leaving. This is detailed on pages 25 and 26 of the external evaluation. We know that young people who stay in education and complete their qualifications have much better outcomes across the board and are less likely to become involved in anti-community activity. We believe this link between the intensive support provided by Strive in maintaining young people in education is something that needs further exploration and there is potential here for a model that could be used more widely in school settings North and South.

Now more than ever, the need exists to nurture sustained relationships at an all-Ireland level in socially disadvantaged communities to ensure real peace-building through the Good Friday Agreement remains a priority. Socially disadvantaged communities are feeling increasingly fragile and marginalised due to the impact of Covid-19, Brexit and debates on the protocol, identity, and border polls, in addition to the current cost-of-living crisis. Many of the issues are the same for those living in rural Border communities as well as those living in urban areas on both sides of the religious and political divide. We want to use this meeting as an opportunity to share with the committee best practice in the context of our youth-led model of peace building. We want to champion the added value of genuine, meaningful and truly collaborative partnership working and highlight the conditions needed for consortiums to thrive. We want to have a discussion on the need for ongoing flexible funding mechanisms that can allow for organisations to work together on a cross-community and cross-Border basis. We welcome the comments and questions of members and look forward to the discussion ahead.