Spread the good news!

We had a lovely surprise last week – Surrey Youth Focus received not one but two awards at the Surrey Digital Awards. The surprise was particularly great because we were only shortlisted for one! We received silver in the best School, Education Or Charity Website website. The winners were World Wildlife Fund and our friends Oakleaf received bronze. Also among the shortlisted were our members Halow.

This was followed by a special ‘Spirit of Surrey’ award which had not been announced prior to the event. The other people on our table said that our faces reflected our shock when our name was announced!

This award is a huge testament to all of the hard work done by Karen with the wonderful support of Su, Kate and Linda on the website over the last five years. The content on the website is always kept fresh. One of the ways in which the team make my life easy is the seamless way that if one person is out of the office, work just gets magically done by someone else with no fuss…updating the website is a good example of this. This award is also a reflection of the decision to invest early in the technology taken by my predecessor Mike Abbott and the team before many charities were doing this and a reflection on Creativitea who designed the site and continue to support us.

But no time to rest on our laurels, our work goes on. Two items about young people caught my eye this past week, one was far better publicised than the other. The sad deaths of several people in Wales due to some young drivers enjoying their new found freedoms with their drivers’ licences made front page headlines. Nothing new, unfortunately, it was ever thus, when I was a teenager, a lad down the road died when driving recklessly.

What was less publicised was data released by the Office for National Statistics a few weeks ago which showed that binge drinking is down significantly among the young. Far from the youth of today being reckless and decadent, the survey described on the BBCs Inside Health radio 4 programme said that the number of young people admitting to binge drinking was down from 1 in 3 in 2005 to 1 in 5 in 2013. There have also been impressive drops in the numbers of 15 year olds smoking in the last 30 years, from 25% to 8%.

It is our job to champion young people, so that the good news gets out to counter the negative stories that tend to dominate our media. Please spread the news!