Hello

It is an honour and a privilege to have taken over from Mike Abbott as CEO of Surrey Youth Focus this week. It is of course, my job to extoll all of SYFs good points. It is particularly easy for me to do it now, when all of the credit goes to others. There are so many good things about Surrey Youth Focus that is hard to know where to start.

The staff team are extremely talented and hard working. It is hard to believe that all of the work that you see (and don’t see) is done by a team of 3.75 Full-Time Equivalents.

The number of high quality relationships that the organisation has is huge – across all sectors of Surrey statutory, voluntary and private organisations, with the support of a president, vice president and patrons of the highest order.  We have an excellent, talented board with a wide range of skills for good governance.

We have an exciting range of services on offer that enable our members to keep informed, meet new people, learn new skills and celebrate the achievements of young people.  Furthermore, new exciting services are in development including our first Youth Social Action conference and Communilab, our network to enable cross-sector collaboration to address youth issues in Surrey. 

Part of our role that may sometimes be less visible is to help address issues affecting young people, such as mental health, by representing the youth voluntary sector on various committees around the county.

The website is extremely well laid out and is updated regularly and we have a good social media presence. And behind the scenes we have all the policies and procedures in place that are needed for a high quality organisation, as has been endorsed by the Charities Evaluation Service which has recently recommended us for Pqasso level 1.

All of this is a huge testament to the work of Mike Abbott who retired last week. I owe a big debt of gratitude to Mike, not only for leading the organisation to where it is today, but also for working tirelessly over the last few months to “draw a line” under as many initiatives as possible (such as our Pqasso assessment), so that I was not left to pick up pieces. Although I officially started on 21^st August, Mike and I have been working over the last few months to affect a smooth handover. Despite this, the last week with Mike felt like coming up to exam time… cramming to get all of the knowledge that I could into my head. Mike promised me no skeletons in the cupboard and I have found none, not even a few bones.

Mike is a hard act to follow, I hope that I can build on all the excellent work to continue scaling new heights. To this end, I am seeking to understand “from the horse’s mouth” the value that organisations get from working with us. I would be grateful to get feedback on Mike’s blog, to ensure that I continue to include the bits that you find useful whilst creating it in my own style.  What value do you get from it? Why is that important? What difference has it made?

The purpose of all this is, of course, to serve the young people of Surrey. To this subject I will turn next week.

Have a lovely weekend,

Cate