Award-winning youth project in the running for another accolade

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The Renfrewshire project has already secured a prestigious Gold Award for Advancing Community and Citizen Wellbeing from CoSLA, the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities.

MSupport targets young people with multiple problems such as mental illness, behavioural issues, offending and drink or drug misuse.

Scottish Government figures show these vulnerable young people often play truant and can find it difficult to stick with training programmes and jobs. These problems can lead to them ending up living in poverty outside mainstream society.

MSupport matches youngsters with a mentor who provides encouragement, guidance and support. The one-to-one nature of the support helps to create a sense of belonging for young people, who can often feel left out or just a face in the crowd.

Councillor Eileen McCartin, convener of Renfrewshire Council's community and family care policy board, said: "Many young people feel powerless to influence the course of their lives. The mentoring relationship is an equal relationship where young people are given the confidence to take control of their lives and make informed choices about their education, employment and training."

Renfrewshire Council has three full time mentors and around 20 part-time mentors. After an initial interview, the young person and their prospective mentor spend four weeks getting to know each other and deciding if they want to work together.

At the end of the fourth week, the mentor and the young person work out an action plan based on an educational, employment or training target. The plan also looks at any issues in the young person's life which might be a barrier to reaching the target.

Case study

After a decade in engineering, Steve fancied a career change. He answered an advert on S1 jobs and became a mentor with MSupport. Steve has been working with Andrew for just over a year and he loves it.

Steve said: "I'm very much a people person and this is a very satisfying role. I act like a big brother or a parent and try and instil an ethic about staying at school, on a training course or in a job. It's about helping the young person take some responsibility for themselves and building on their self worth. Some of these kids have no self-esteem and no self-confidence. They often come from a poor background and they're locked in a cycle where their friends don't work, their parents don't work, their uncles don't work. Some of these kids can't see anything beyond their own housing scheme."

"Building a relationship is the key. One of my skills is making connections. I was not so much born with a silver spoon in my mouth as a brass one! I grew up on a scheme and I had problems with my school and my parents. That gives me something in common with these young people right from the start."

"I started working with Andrew when he was 16. He is a very capable person but his opportunities have been limited because of where he was brought up. He was always clashing with his teachers and was taken out of mainstream education."

"He's gone from strength to strength and he's done everything I thought he could. He got into a training scheme and now he's in a job. He's really committed."

"Andrew is a success story. He's just grabbed everything with both hands and things are looking very positive for him. It's changed his life around because it could have gone either way. He just needed a bit of support and guidance. I just pointed him in the right direction."

Press release: Monday 23 June 2008