Features / Bristol Charity Advent Calendar 2024
Bristol Charity Advent Calendar 2024, Day 9: Ignite Life
Ignite Life Bristol supports young people and families to overcome adversity, by providing holistic care tailored to individual needs.
Their vision is to relieve the needs of disadvantaged and/or marginalised young people through supporting with wellbeing and mental health, educational support, food poverty, family support, access to sport and other life changing opportunities and addressing economic inequalities.
is needed now More than ever
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The Kingswood based charity provide three main strands of care, mentoring, counselling and food support.
Durning mentoring young people are provided with 1:1 support and guidance to focus on building a relationship with safe adults, that allow them to access new meaningful and positive opportunities.
Those opportunities could be to access sport and fitness, build self-esteem and confidence, enhance life skills such as cooking, art and music, wellbeing support or providing resources to gain employment and volunteer roles.
Through their counselling strand, this is also a 1:1 service for young people who, too often, slip through the net due to social disadvantage or being marginalised. They offer a safe space for young people to explore emotions and past traumas or challenges with a professional counsellor without the fear of judgement.
The counselling sessions also aim to provide long-term tools for young people and families utilise to manage future crisis.
Family support counselling is also available for families to forge strong and healthy relationships and overcome any challenges.
The food parcels are full of a variety of fruit and vegetables
Lastly, their food services are aimed at alleviating food poverty, they can be accessed via food bank or there is the option to get food parcels, with 23,514 food parcels being delivered last year. They hope to also reduce the stigma around accessing food services so young people and families can access healthy and nutritional food.
They also launched a youth group in September 2023, with the aim of providing young people who ordinarily wouldn’t be able to access traditional youth groups to additional needs, or life barriers.
The groups activities which are youth led have included picnics, bowling trips and cooking. The decision to allow them to lead it, provides them with a sense of autonomy.
On December 20 and 21, they will be at the Kings Chase shopping centre in Kingswood for some free festive family fun
The charities 2023 Impact Report shows that 712 hours of mentoring was provided from August 2021 to August 2022, they were able to offer counselling between 6 and 24 weeks to 62 people, of those who completed counselling 100 per cent achieved their intended outcomes.
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Ignite Life has been given a handful of charity places in the Bath Half 2025 run and they are looking for people who are up for the challenge of running 13.1 miles and fundraising for young people in the community.
All photos: Ignite Life
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