2025-08-31-accounts - Youth Across Hemel

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Youth Across Hemel Financial Statement for year ending 31st August 2025

Balance b/fwd as at 1st September 2024 Income Regular Offering One-off donations Gift Aid Grants Additional gifts Payments Events Publicity Training ThirtyOneEight Insurance / IT It's Your Move Staff costs Debtors Gift Aid Owing Net balance as at 31st August 2025	£6,852.90 £3,538.99 £5,324.58 £1,882.46 £500.00 £107.27 £11,353.30 £950.11 £515.00 £125.00 £234.66 £950.17 £344.00 £4,941.48 £8,060.42 £1,075.48 £1,075.48 £9,070.30

Statement of Assets & Liabilities

Bank Current A/C £10,145.78 Gift Aid Owing £1,075.48 Net Assets £9,070.30

Treasurers Statement

I have prepared the financial statement for the year ending 31 August 2025 for the accounting records of Youth Across Hemel.

Matthew Masters

Treasurer

5 September 2025

Youth Across Hemel: Annual Report September 2024 to July 2025

I am pleased to present this report as we near the end of the seventh full year that Youth Across Hemel (“YAH”) has operated as a registered charity. As we enter a new year, we continue to make good progress in all our focus areas and have built capacity to grow in influence and impact.

1. Providing Resources

Since forming as a newly formed charity in July 2018, our focus has been on building up capacity, getting policies and procedures in place, securing volunteers and funding and building important networks and relationships.

We have focused our limited resources on the following areas;

Building networks and relationships

We have maintained and established new relationships with head teachers, teachers, church leaders, youth leaders and other youth organisations.

Training

We have been actively seeking volunteers, with a number of Hemel’s young adults having assisted with events and other activities.

We have trained a team of volunteer school workers who deliver lessons as part of the RE curriculum in two local schools. Providing Safeguarding and mental health training to all our staff and volunteers. We were also able to send four of our staff and volunteers on First Aid courses this year. We look to continue to expand this model over the coming year, ensuring that they are appropriately trained and supported for the work they are involved with.

Working with local churches

We have been engaging and working with a number of local church leaders and youth workers and, wherever possible, using their facilities for events and activities. From January 2025 we visited six local churches to update them on the work and engage their support through volunteering, prayer and donations.

In 2025 we were able to visit two new churches and create a video that we showed to churches and sent to ones we did not get to visit this time, updating them on what we have been doing, how we have grown and how they can help.

Running free events

Youth Across Hemel volunteers who also comprise of people from other churches and organisations, have run four free events over the last year. Below is more information of what we got up to at each event.

THE MIX: Lets go Rome at St George’s URC – October 2024

Themed “Lets go Rome”, this Mix brought 26 young people together to try chariot racing (pedal carts), inflatable gladiator wars, balloon archery and lots more.

Youth Across Hemel: Annual Report September 2024 to July 2025

We had an amazing time of worship from Hannah and Jemma young and a challenging talk from Prit Josephs on what it means to put on the full armer of God daily. We also had delicious snacks including fruit skewers and mocktails.

BONFIRE PARTY – November 2024

A lovely evening under the open sky at Spring Meadow Farm, by a roaring bonfire. We had team games, sparklers, glow sticks, crafts toasted marshmallows, and chocolate milk.

The young people had lots of fun playing team games like charades and playing with glow sticks and sparklers. We had worship around the campfire and finished with roasting and eating marshmallows.

The Bonfire Party is always a very magical and fun evenings for our young people. Thank you to all our wonderful helpers and volunteers for making it a safe and enjoyable time.

THE MIX: Heroes Unleashed at Christ church Baptist, March 2025

In this Mix we had an inflatable obstacle course that the young people did a variety of games in and really enjoyed. Then we had a ‘Hero Training Academy’ set up for the young people to try out dodgeball, sticky hands games, cup games for dexterity, wolverine Pictionary and more. This was done in groups, and they cheered on their teammates to win.

We also had yummy snacks and drinks for them to have while we had worship by Hannah and Jemma Young with an inspiring talk from Mary Perkis from STEP about how Jesus is the ultimate superhero.

Youth Across Hemel: Annual Report September 2024 to July 2025

LETS GO KAYAKING – June 2025

After a few technique tips, 14 young people took to the Grand Union canal with speed and quickly learnt skills. They played tag in their kayaks, with a few splashes in the sunshine and a few raindrops. The young people had lots of fun learning a new skill together.

2. Consulting and Supporting Local Churches

Engagement

YAH seeks to support local churches in the youth work they are doing, either in their churches or local schools. We aim to visit the most active churches once every two years and we continued to invest in a high quality video which we sent to churches which we were unable to visit.

Building Capacity and Momentum

We continued to build our database of contacts, ensuring that we are GDPR compliant, and have segmented our contacts into different interest groups in order to support relevant contact. We continue to seek and train volunteers to help keep our data up-to-date and compliant.

Collaboration with churches and organisations

We have been liaising with a number of different local churches and para-church organisations, including STEP. We continue to collaborate wherever we can and to encourage local churches to take the lead and provide volunteers and resources wherever possible.

3. Working with Schools

Wherever possible, YAH prefers to collaborate with existing partnerships rather than compete with other organisations or duplicate activity. We work mainly through the following;

Providing RE lessons

In the academic year 2024/25 we have been able to provide lessons to Hemel Hempstead School and Kings Langley School on miracles, religious art, suffering, ultimate questions and Jesus as the Messiah. As well as a revision lesson for year 11s on the Eucharist run by Andrew Brazier.

We ran a total of 47 individual lessons in 23/24, reaching an estimated 1400 students across two schools.

These lessons were given high praise by the head of RE from both schools. They believed that the lessons positively affected the student’s grades and helped them to understand Christian views better. The teachers also gave us feedback that the students enjoyed our lessons and have asked when we would be coming back and delivering more lessons.

Partnership with STEP in St Albans

Our partnership with STEP has given YAH access to large array of high-quality lesson plans which avoids duplication of work. STEP has continued to support us in lending us their resources and demonstrating their lessons to our team. We have successfully adapted and utilised these resources and, in doing so, have saved a significant amount of time and delivered more effectively. We

Youth Across Hemel: Annual Report September 2024 to July 2025

continue to be very grateful for Chris Birch-Evans and his team for their generosity and encouragement.

Creating our own lesson plans

This year we asked Andrew Brazier to run a revision lesson for year 11s at Kings Langley School, due to his extensive knowledge and training on the Eucharist and who it is done in many different denominations. The head of RE that requested this from us at KLS had very high praise for Andrew and the lessons that he ran. We plan to ask Andrew to teach this lesson to the rest of our volunteers so that we can offer this revision lesson to other schools next year too.

Lunchtime and afterschool clubs

The Summit: Kings Langley School Year 9/10 - This is a weekly lunchtime club run by Sue Brazier and Keith Gower from All Saints Church, Kings Langley and YAH Volunteer Lisa Dussek. This is a safe and fun space for year 9 and up at Kings Langley School to talk about Jesus and the bible while playing games, eating snacks and making new friends.
The Summit: Kings Langley Year 7/8 - This is a club run by Angela Hodgkinson from St Laurance Church along with one of our YAH volunteers to assist her weekly. Angela creates a safe space for year 7 and 8s to come and spend time with friends, learn about Jesus and play games.
Connect: Hemel Hempstead School - This is a weekly lunchtime club run entirely by South Hill Church Children’s and Families worker, Anna Nicks and Youth Worker, Sorrell Harden at the Hemel Hempstead School (HHS).
The Summit club: Adeyfield Academy – This is a club that we launched in April 2025 by Tee Josephs, along with a YAH volunteer. Since its start, they have seen a number of young people come and go. This now has a core group of year 9 boys that attend weekly who are very interested in learning about Jesus, learning how to read the bible and spend time together. It is a safe space to talk about real issues, play games and have snacks together.

4. Networking

YAH seeks every opportunity to link people together and to encourage collaboration between different groups where appropriate. Some of the networking activities we have done include:

Database and Mailing list

Our database includes school heads and teachers, church leaders, organisation leaders, church youth workers, volunteers, prayer supporters and donors. We do not currently keep any designatory data on Youth on our databases, preferring to drive all communications via Churches, Youth Leaders and School groups. This growing source of data has proved to be invaluable for our networking activity. A bi-annual e-news report is issued to keep our key audiences up-to-date with events and developments

School Heads and Leadership Team

We have been engaging with school leaders from four of the ten target schools in our area. We hope to engage further with more head teachers directly in 2025/26.

Youth Across Hemel: Annual Report September 2024 to July 2025

Attending events

In 2025 Daniella Hobbs attended a conference run by Youthscape and came back with lots of new ideas and recourses to share with the team. We will continue to attend events run by other church and para-church organisations where relevant to the work of YAH.

Networking Breakfasts / Events

Having previously run Teachers and Church leaders networking breakfasts and a Youth work toolkit for churches, we are planning to run networking events in the future for current and potential fundraisers to increase the funding base for our work.

5. Prayer and Financial Support

We have a WhatsApp group for prayer supporters where we post items for prayer. If you would like to be added to this list, please contact info@yahemel.co.uk giving your email / mobile number with permission to use.

If you would like to offer Financial Support to the work of YAH please contact Treasurer@YAHemel.co.uk, or visit our website for further information.

6. Team updates

We were very pleased to have several volunteers join our team to help at events - Pritam and Tirzah Josephs, Tom and Charis Beadle from Verso Vineyard Hemel, Jemma and Hannah Young from Hemel Hempstead Community Church (HHCH), Tom and Sarah Powell from Christchurch and Primrose Lwanga from Sunrise.

Our schools team includes Sue Brazier and Keith Gower from All Saints, Angela Hodgkinson from St Laurence Church, Anne Borland from Verso Vineyard Hemel, Ian Chantrell from St Pauls Chipperfield, Andrew Brazier from HH Methodist Church, David Young & Richard Winski from HHCH, Andy Barton from Belmont Road Baptist and Anna Nicks and Sorrel from South Hill Church.

We are also very pleased that we have had new Volunteers that have joined our schools and clubs team this year. Sue, Keith, Angela, Ian, Anne and more in the process.

7. The Coming Year

On reflection, it was a year of great progress for Youth Across Hemel, and we have set some ambitious targets for 2025/26 at our Strategy & planning event in July.

Key for us over the next year will be:

1) to continue expand and train our network of volunteers, to enable us to take on new opportunities
2) to increase regular giving, from individuals as well as other local organisations; and
3) to help grow and deepen relationships between the ten target schools in our area and their local churches.
4) to appoint a schools’ liaison officer to help extend RE provision in local schools
5) To grow our base of prayer support.

Youth Across Hemel: Annual Report September 2024 to July 2025

I am grateful to the team for their hard work, enthusiasm and dedication and my desire for this next year is that we steward our opportunities well. in these times, when only 5% of youth attend church, we have been given a privileged opportunity to give an authentic Christian viewpoint in their schools. We need to be open to every God given opportunity to explain the hope that we have been given. We stand for Youth across Hemel Hempstead, will you stand with us?

Damon Harding Chairperson Youth Across Hemel