BIG Innovation provides New Year resolution for Welsh projects

A project to provide advice and support for student sex workers and a project to address racism and far-right extremism in young people are among the range of groups throughout Wales to share in more than £1 million awarded by the Big Lottery Fund today.

Five projects across Wales share in the £1,376,049 awarded under the first round of the BIG Innovation programme, which aims to specifically support projects that test new ways of tackling emerging and existing social problems.

The news comes as the programme opens for the second round of applications, with potential applicants having until Thursday, February 23, 2012 to apply for grants of between £20,000 and £1 million for innovative new projects.

Sexual health agencies, academics and The National Union of Students (NUS) are concerned that increasing numbers of students are working in sex markets in Wales to pay for their education, and that these students may not be accessing appropriate sexual health services. A grant of nearly half a million pounds (£489,143) under the first round to Swansea University will enable them to run the Wales-wide Interactive Health: Student Sex Workers project. The money will be used to establish a three year project to promote learning and understanding about student sex worker needs and associated issues and to provide them with an innovative sexual health service. The project will provide student sex workers, who live and work in Wales, with advice and support and will sign-post them to local services. The project will also provide sexual health information and best practice guidance for Welsh Universities and local services.

Highlighting the importance of the project, Dr Tracey Sagar, the Principal Investigator for the project and a Lecturer at Swansea University who specialises in the regulation of sex work, said: "At the moment we know we have a student sex worker community in Wales but we do not really understand their motivations and needs. This project will address this knowledge gap and develop services which are ‘fit for purpose’."

"Beginning in June 2012 and working with our expert partners – Terrence Higgins Trust, Cardiff and Vale Integrated Sexual Health, The National Union of Students Wales and Newport Film School, we will embark on a multi-media awareness raising campaign and develop an innovative cross sector e-health service for the student sex worker population in Wales. In the current economic climate it really does take an objective funder whose overriding concern is ‘community’ and ‘need’ to fund an innovative project such as this. We are so very grateful to the Big Lottery Innovation Fund for making this award."

Designed to address the potential for racism and far-right extremism in young people in Swansea, the Ethnic Youth Support Team will use their award of £169,616 to run the Think Project, which will test and develop new ways of working with the most disengaged young white people in Wales. The project aims to respond to the challenges posed by the growing presence and legitimacy of the far-right in the UK and Europe, and the growing normalisation of racist rhetoric, attitudes and behaviour at the local and national level.

Outlining the importance of the project, which is due to start in April this year, Ethnic Youth Support Team Director, Rocio Cifuentes, said: "Unfortunately, despite developments such as Steven Lawrence’s killers facing justice at last, racism and support for the far-right are not history, but are very much alive and kicking in some parts of our community. Through the Think Project we hope to work with young people who might not have had the chance to learn much positive stuff about immigrants, black people, and so on, and to change this by giving them a chance to learn, experience and think for themselves, while at the same time recognising their grievances and helping them improve their own communities."

And in another project encompassing the whole of Wales, the Barnardo's charity will spend £265,572 on developing standardised assessment tools for use with teenage girls who have engaged in sexually harmful behaviour towards others. The project, which will formally commence on 1 April 2012, includes the development of a treatment manual for professionals, allowing these girls to reduce any risks they pose to others and allow them to move toward healthy adult relationships.

Denise Moultrie, Children's Services Manager at Barnardo's Cymru Taith Service, said: "We know that around one third of sexual abuse in the UK is carried out by young people. While the majority of abuse is carried out by males, girls and young women also sexually abuse. Barnardo’s Cymru Taith Service has worked for eleven years in Wales with children and young people who have engaged in sexually harmful behaviour and so are well placed to complete this research and development work, not before undertaken in the UK. We need to better understand the psychological profile of young women who sexually assault others, so that we can better address their specific needs."

She added: "This project will represent a significant step forward in our understanding and allow professionals, for the first time in the UK, to offer informed assessments of girls’ treatment needs and offer the most suitable interventions. This will reduce ongoing risk to others in the community and improve the likelihood that these young women will go on to develop safe and healthy relationships."

Highlighting the importance of the projects funded and urging more groups to apply for funding under the second round, Big Lottery Fund Wales Committee Member and Chair of the BIG Innovation Committee, Graham Benfield, said: "The Big Lottery Fund is committed to bringing about real improvements to communities most in need but recognises that existing ways of meeting need do not always work and that some needs are new with no ways of addressing them. This is why we launched BIG Innovation in Wales. As the projects funded today demonstrate, it can help turn people’s big new ideas into a reality."

He added: "Our message is simple - if a group or organisation has an innovative new idea for a project which provides new solutions which better address emerging and entrenched social problems- then we definitely want to hear from them."

BIG is interested in applications from a broad range of sectors and organisations to allow the "best and truly innovative" ideas to be identified and funded. It will consider an idea as being new if it hasn’t been tried anywhere else in the UK and will fund local, regional or national projects as long as at least 75 per cent of the people who will benefit live in Wales.

Other key requirements include a demonstration that the project is new and innovative, extensive consultation with people interested in the work and other service providers, thorough research to identify needs and demonstration of working with local regional or national organisations to make the best use of expertise.

For further information about the BIG Innovation programme and how you can apply for funding, please visit www.biglotteryfund.org.uk/wales