Cumbria Youth Alliance is the lead youth infrastructure
charity in Cumbria. For over 25 years, we have worked
directly with young people while also strengthening the
organisations and systems that support them.
Everything we do sits under four strategic pillars:
supporting young people directly, championing youth
voice, strengthening the youth sector, and driving
collaboration across the county.
Founded in 1998 and an independent charity since 2000, CYA has grown from a small coordinating
body into an organisation with a national profile.
What makes CYA unique is its dual role: both a frontline deliverer of programmes and a backbone
organisation for the entire youth sector in Cumbria. Connecting what happens on the ground with
what happens in policy, and making sure young people in Cumbria are not left behind.
Mission: To enable young people to reach their full potential. Vision: To be the lead organisation
for the development and quality assurance of youth provision in Cumbria, where every young
person can thrive and achieve a sustainable and positive future.
CYA operates at three levels simultaneously: directly with young people, with the organisations that
serve them, and with the systems and policies that shape what is possible.
What we learn from working directly with young people feeds into how we support other organisations, and that shapes the evidence we use.
The Scale of our reach (2024 - 2025 numbers):
These are not just numbers. Behind every one is a young person who got support they would not have
had otherwise, or a youth worker who is better equipped to meet the needs of young people they are
supporting.
11,821 individuals supported through CYA and partner organisations
3,151 young people who led change
400+ organisations supported with funding, tools and best practice
831 professionals and volunteers trained
61 newly qualified youth workers to date
In 25yrs, over 100,000 lives changed and 30,000 of those were in the last five years.
We have a new building opening soon ( once we secure the last remaining shortfall of c90,000 from a 2.1million build project). Bringing youth services together under one roof in a county where they have always been scattered. When the National Youth Strategy arrived saying the same thing, we had already started building it.
A Youth Advisory Group are designing the youth space in the
building, if we are asking young people to use it, they should
have a say in what it looks like. It is the biggest thing CYA has
built, and it says a lot about where we are going.
A digital product is heading to market - The ME Tool
The Me Tool started as a solution to a measurement problem we found inside our own programmes. Traditional measures for example, schools only measure academic attainment and Government using inappropriate measures such as the Indices of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) to determine funding for young people - currently over 350Million in Government programmes with NO Funds for Cumbria, because the IMD does not measure or highlight the young people with the most barriers and most in need. Traditional measures were not capturing what was actually changing for young people, their journey or recognising that change is rarely linear. So we built something to track it, the ME Tool measures progress across ten social and emotional factors: relationships, aspiration, communication, identity, motivation, wellbeing and more.
Now being built into a digital web application, this will be available to organisations across the country. Working with Ipsos Mori and externally evaluated by the Institute for Employment Studies.
With programmes that shape National policy such as our Forging Futures Programme with 58% sustained employment Vs 28% national average - 10% above the IPS Gold Standard
