For me, I don’t think it’s right when adults talk about raising young people’s aspirations. It implies that young people are lacking in ambition which, in my experience, could not be further from the truth.

If you come to one of our mentoring projects, it won’t take you long to see that the young people we work with have huge ambition for their futures.

Chef, astronaut, entrepreneur, musician, teacher- the young people I work with want to do brilliant and exciting things with their lives.

They don’t need us, or anyone else, to tell them to dream big. They don’t need us to raise their aspirations.

Instead, I believe the right focus for us as supportive adults should be how we help young people realise and achieve those ambitions. How do we give them the tools and networks they need to go on and live good, happy and successful lives on their own terms?

Here are three ways in which ReachOut does this:  

1) Visiting inspiring workplaces

Through our Workplace Experience Visit programme, we partner with a range of different businesses, aiming to introduce the idea of a workplace, different sectors and specific roles to our mentees.

These visits give young people an insight into a variety of different careers including the boardrooms of investment companies, behind the scenes at hotels and restaurants, art galleries, university lecture theatres and looking after animals on the farm.

For some mentees, this could help give them ideas about what their future could look like or, just as usefully, confirm what they don’t want to do.  

After a recent trip to Manchester Metropolitan University, for example, one of our Project Officers told me that his group have been really thinking about their future careers and asking more questions to their mentors about how they could get there.

2) Showing real and relatable journeys

Our mentors often act as additional role-models for the young people they work with. That’s why we ask them to do ‘mentors shares’ – presentations in front of the whole group, looking at their lives and careers.

Crucially, these mentor shares show the ups and downs of how the mentors got to where they are – the bumps and twists in the road that don’t always make it into job adverts or recruitment brochures.

There’s often so much pressure on young people to do specific things in a specific way, and have everything planned out. Our mentor shares give them the confidence to know that everyone can chart their own path. It’s a real life look at what it means to set out and find your way.

 3) Practice setting achievable goals

Another focus of our mentoring projects is goal setting. Working with their mentors, the young people have the opportunity to practice setting goals in a safe environment, working out what steps they want to take to make a change.

In a project I visited recently, some of the goals set by mentees included achieving better attendance, reading a chapter of a book every day, and being confident enough to contribute to group discussions. 

The point of this is to get them used to setting goals, understanding how to work towards them and feeling confident in their ability to achieve them. As those goals become bigger as the mentees get older, they have the experience and the tools to take things step by step and not feel overwhelmed.

Why does all this matter?

Through all of this, our aim is to try and level the playfield, making sure that the young people we work with have the same doors open to them as anyone else.

All of this can be perfectly summed up by Boma, a former mentee and a member of our alumni community.

“We all know that children from well-off backgrounds benefit from better opportunities,” he told us when we spoke to him recently. “They generally have access to more extra-curricular programmes, as well as access to a wide range of people beyond their parents and teachers who can mentor and guide them. For me and my friends who took part in ReachOut, it helped to level the playing field, providing us with those same opportunities.”