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We are stepping up our fight for young people
Empire Fighting Chance have launched a new impact report.
We are ‘stepping up our fight’ for young people against systemic injustice and inequality.
Having lost 3 young people to knife crime in the last 18 months, we felt propelled to amplify our focus this year on tackling youth violence and intensifying our work in this area.
Sadly, since the report has been published we have lost another young person, as the issue of youth violence reaches crisis point.
Across our three programmes, Box Champions, Box Therapy and Box Careers, we have amplified our focus and zoned in on youth violence. We are stepping up the quality of our programmes, stepping up the scale of our projects across the UK, and stepping up our knowledge and insight from worldwide experts.
As knife crime incidents increase in our home of Bristol and across the UK, we felt forced to change, to accept we did not have all their answers and be open to new and radical solutions further afield. We travelled to Colombia and Canada to learn from initiatives that have successfully intervened and made significant changes to making cities safer.
Taking inspiration from these other countries at tackling youth violence, we stepped up our fight for young people. We improved our boxing and psychology programmes, intensified our role in Bristol and grew a national movement of organisations using our work in their communities.
We worked with 9,593 young people, directly supported 3,354, and we trained boxing clubs and youth services to work with 6,239 young people.
And we left 2023 proud of the increased impact that we're having on young people's lives in Bristol and other places across the country.
CEO of Empire Fighting Chance Martin Bisp said: “In a testing year we were all left reflecting on tragedy, but feeling driven to make a change, to learn from the best, and try and take this into our work to create maximum impact for young people.
I sincerely believe this has improved what we do, our understanding and expertise to take this into 2024, where some very exciting plans are around the corner. Watch this space, as we intend to make some big waves and tackle some of the most pressing issues affecting young people today.
For now please take a moment to read what is now our 7th annual report since we started in 2014, and one where we continue to grow and adapt to the ever changing challenges we all face.”
