European Social Fund in England
2007 - 2013
Queen's Award for Cornish Young Parents project
Cornwall’s Lord-Lieutenant Lady Mary Holborow, has presented the Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service to the county’s Wild Young Parents project.
At a special ceremony held at the Redruth Children’s Centre in July, Lady Mary said she felt honoured to be representing the Queen and delivering the certificate Her Majesty had signed personally together with a commemorative crystal.
The Queen’s Award, set up during the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in 2002, is the group equivalent of an MBE. During the celebration Lady Mary outlined why the WILD group had been chosen for the honour.
She said: “The panel felt that hundreds of young mothers have gained invaluable support and a real chance to make long lasting improvement in their lives resulting in a much stronger family cohesion.”
She added that with 98 unpaid people working alongside the full and part-time WILD staff the group had clearly realised the importance of volunteering through their membership.
The WILD project was set up 16 years ago and is now supported with European Social Fund (ESF) Convergence funding. Its aim is to provide opportunities for young mothers to develop their skills, improve their self-esteem and make positive healthy choices through training, peer mentoring and workshops.
One specific feature of the group is to encourage clients to be more self-reliant rather than just use services provided by others. The success of the project speaks for itself with 36% of clients going on to some form of further education, 31% into work and the many of the remainder becoming volunteers within the group continuing the support for other young parents.
The Learning and Skills Council (LSC) Skills Development Director for ESF in the SW Region, Mark Williams, said: "WILD is an excellent and highly successful project. It has continued to maintain and develop its high quality service responding directly to the needs of young mothers in Cornwall. It has become accepted as a core part of the provision offered to Cornish women in need of support. It has proven itself to be an effective solution, led by people who truly understand the needs of the group and enabling them to access mainstream learning and skills provision."
As an extra honour for the WILD project Her Majesty the Queen also invited four representatives to attend the annual Garden Party at Buckingham Palace, which took place the day before the award presentation.
Those accepting the invitation were WILD’s East Cornwall Co-ordinator, Jenny Polkinghorn and the Project Worker for Falmouth and Truro, Mental Health and Domestic Conflict officer for the group, Ellie Nicholas. They chose to take two WILD young mothers with them.
Ellie said: “It was fantastic, the experience made us feel extremely special and we felt so lucky because the Queen and Prince Philip were there. It was the first time both mum’s had been to London so we made a day of it and took them to see all the sights: the London Eye, Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, but the highlight was definitely being so close to the Queen.”
More information on Queen's Award for Cornish Young Parents project and Case Studies.