Youth Focus North East has been working over the last five years to develop and deliver projects and programmes of work specifically designed to help young people, and those who support them, to tackle loneliness and isolation.

Throughout our work, whenever we look at the causes of young people’s loneliness and isolation social media is invariably mentioned as a significant factor. Often the discussion then moves onto the negative influence of social media use – and it is clear that social media does present significant challenges to many people’s emotional wellbeing. It would, therefore, be easy to overlook the positive aspects social media can bring for young people. There can be a complex interplay – many workers will have stories of the positive impact young people find by connecting to others on Facebook or the likes they get on an Instagram picture; closely followed by the negative aspect that comes with fewer likes on their next picture or the comments that then begin, not all of which are positive. 

UK Youth is supporting a network of organisations working across the United Kingdom to support young people to tackle loneliness and isolation. UK Youth who have produced a blog around this work called Let’s Talk Loneliness. 

Resources to help you learn about loneliness and tackle it.

The Half a World Away project funded by the Cooperative Foundation has brought together young people from urban and rural areas of the North East to learn about how where they live has an impact on their lives and their communities. Sharing experiences and learning to make positive changes for themselves and others.

Book of Invisible Paths Journal.

his resource pack has been designed for those workers who either have little or no experience of working with young people that are experiencing feelings or loneliness or isolation, or those professionals who may be at the early states of working with young people on these kind of issues.

Funded by the Co-op Foundation, the resource pack has been developed in collaboration with Scarborough and Ryedale Carers Resource, an organisation which supports young carers and has experience of delivering projects specifically focused on tackling youth loneliness and isolation to give insight on how these feelings manifest, linked to their situations. 

A group of young people from Newcastle United Foundation and Princes Trust have created this mindful colouring book to help tackle Youth Loneliness and Isolation. Youth Focus North East have supported the young people to create the book through the Belong Collective Programme, funded by the Astra Foundation and Co-op Foundation.

The book draws upon the young peoples own experiences. Highlighting a number of aspects that bring difficulties and feelings of isolation and loneliness. It shows solutions they feel would support other young people to overcome similar things.

This app is designed to support young LGBTQ young people who might be experiencing loneliness and/or isolation. It forms part of a wider toolkit of resources to support young people around loneliness and isolation developed through the National Youth Partnership’s ‘Tackling Youth Loneliness’ project, with funding from the Co-operative Foundation.

Government and the Co-op Foundation, through the Building Connections Fund, are supporting The National Youth Partnership to develop a range of resources to help workers and organisations support young people to tackle loneliness and isolation.

To mark this year’s Mental Health Awareness Week, our voters discussed the theme of loneliness and its links to our wellbeing. The lessons gave them insight into the facts behind the “loneliness epidemic” in the UK, as well as allowing them to consider what they could do to tackle the issue in their own lives.

Primary voters decided: “Are you comfortable talking about loneliness?”, while our Secondary & College voters discussed: “Are young people equipped to deal with loneliness?”

So far, 32,040 young people in the UK took part in this vote.

This pack is for youth workers, youth leaders, creative arts leaders and teachers that want to support young people to talk about loneliness together, to tell their stories, and to share them with others – especially those who don’t belong to a youth group, or who might be more comfortable telling their story in an anonymous digital universe.

The Include Autism resource has been created by members of the charity Ambitious for Autism’s Youth Council to help tackle the problem of loneliness and social isolation felt by many of their peers. According to research by the Jo Cox Loneliness Commission, 81% of autistic adults say they feel lonely at least some of the time due to autism-related anxiety, while over 80% of young people with autism believe they spend less time socialising than their peers. The new toolkit, which has been funded by the Comic Relief Sustainability Fund, has been developed to give those running youth groups or clubs a better understanding of autism and how to support autistic young people. 

Rise is a social action project, we use music to engage young people in exploring their ideas and experiences of loneliness,  isolation and moving to high school. We then challenge them to think how they can use these experiences to help others. Make Some Noise worked across several schools in the Stoke On Trent area both primary and secondary. In the primary schools we used the resources created in year one of the project in combination with facilitated music sessions to help participants explore their attitudes toward moving school, express their fears and hopes about this and explore the value of friendship and connection by writing a song as a class.

At St Peter’s academy we worked with a group of especially vulnerable students in the year 7 nature group and helped them develop new skills and explore their attitudes to friendship and connection. At the Coop Academy we worked with year 7 and year 10 groups and the coop young leaders to explore all of the above and to help design a set of resources that could be used with year 6 pupils to communicate ideas around the aims of the project and to encourage them to support each other and to seek support if they need it.

You may be wondering what this pack is and why you have been asked to fill it in… well let us explain… While you are working with us we want to hear about your experience; what is going well and also what needs to be improved. This is really important to us.

One very important topic we would like to focus upon is helping people feel less isolated and lonely.

Acrostic Poetry.

This one day training course has been designed to raise awareness and improve understanding about youth loneliness. The delivery of this training can be adapted depending on the level of knowledge participants have. 

The idea for this colouring book came from discussions with young people across the country about things that help combat feelings of isolation and loneliness. They wanted to produce something that encapsulated all of these ideas and in a way they could also share with others.

The book itself will take you on a journey across the country and explore these activities and introduce you to local folklore tales and stories from each of the areas.

Youth Focus North East has developed a short film called ‘We Are You’, which they use in workshops with young people in schools and at youth projects to help start conversations about loneliness and isolation. The film was created by young people, based on their own experiences of feeling lonely or isolated. 

This session was designed by Youth Focus NW who are a “strategic hub with youth work values at the heart of every piece of work. Across the North West of England and beyond our work is driven by a desire to improve the lives of young people. 

It can be easy to feel lonely and isolated – even when we’re surrounded by other people. Melissa from the #YSHealth Panel has shared her top tips for tackling loneliness.

This project is the product of collaborative effort of young people in the UK Youth Movement, with the aim to produce an up-to-date and helpful guide for youth workers in order to identify and tackle youth loneliness in their communities.

Youth Cymru worked with young people to create a toolkit and lead social action projects which allowed them to gain a better understanding of loneliness, enhance self confidence, deepen self-efficacy and enable a sense of external agency, empowering and supporting them to experience community cohesion and connections.

Lonely Lego document.

Funded by the Co-operative Foundation, the resource pack has been developed by youth workers who have experience of delivering projects specifically focused on tackling youth loneliness and isolation and young people who have experienced homelessness to give insight on how these feelings manifest, linked to their situations.