The primary aim of The Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust is to “transform the lives of young people and achieve real social change”. The Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust works with young people aged between 13-30. We are also heavily involved in the local community and do a range of community engagement activities. Our wide range of beneficiaries include: secondary school students, aspiring architecture students, unemployed graduates, aspiring journalists, community organisations and the local community.
Our programme beneficiaries are primarily from disadvantaged and from backgrounds that are under-represented in certain professional industries such as; the media or architecture. The criteria for these could be: being the recipient of Free School Meals (FSM), being the first in a family to go to university or coming from a minority ethnic background that is traditionally underrepresented within a certain profession.
Our services consist of the different programmes that we run; Career Pathways Schools (career inspiration/guidance); Career Pathways Graduates (employment support); Building Futures (support for aspiring architecture students); Police Community Engagement (community development); Lewisham BME Network (community development); SLIK Magazine (skills development); Political Journalism Internship (work experience)
Our impact is big both on a local and regional level. Our diverse range of unique programmes ensures that we are able to help young people in a variety of different ways and cater for many different needs. The broad age range of our beneficiaries means that we are able to help young people at all ends of the employment ladder. At a local level, our name carries a big weight and we do our utmost to ensure that we engage the local community on the issues that affect them and we try to empower local organisations to increase their impact.
We provide a multitude of different services to reach and help our target groups and achieve our objectives of transforming the lives of young people and achieving real social change. These services fall under different projects that we run, these include:
Career Pathways (Schools) - The Career Pathway programme is designed to provide advice, guidance, support and inspiration to disadvantaged young people aged 13-18.
The programme aims to build upon careers guidance provision in schools, thereby helping disadvantaged young people to aspire to, plan for, and develop careers.
Career Pathways (Graduates)- The Career Pathways Graduate strand, it is open to all graduates aged up to 25 years. It seeks to work with graduates to gain and sustain employment in their chosen professions. It helps to do this by: offering 1-to-1 support, Industry Seminars and a range of employability training
Building Futures- The Stephen Lawrence Building Futures Programme supports aspiring BME young people wishing to pursue a career in architecture. It does this through offering valuable work experience placements, mentoring opportunities and workshops, as well as sharing valuable internship opportunities with our network
Police Community Engagement Programme- The Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust is working with the College of Policing on a Programme designed to show the new police recruits to both the benefits of community orientated policing and the work that third sector and community organisations do.
Lewisham BME Network- The aim of the network is to enable BME Voluntary & Community Organisations in the borough of Lewisham to share information, build consortia and collaborate cross sector, increase representation and better represent views to public bodies, funders and decision makers.
Political Journalism Internship- This internship offers a fantastic opportunity for aspiring young journalists from under-represented and disadvantaged backgrounds to get a flavour of what being a political journalist is like. The two week internship is based at the Parliamentary Press Gallery which is very much the epicentre of British political journalism.
Over the course of the two weeks the interns will shadow political journalists from some of the most renowned and recognised media outlets in the country.
SLIK Magazine- A youth led (16-24) digital magazine called “SLIK” (Stephen Lawrence Instils Knowledge).
The aim of the Project is to raise awareness and improve the chances of a career in journalism for a young person through; offering workshops and training from industry experts and professionals on specific aspects of journalism such a: creative writing; graphic design and how to use social media effectively.
