Exploring purpose together
This is a short guide for anyone mentoring at Youth Active, whether you are a volunteer running a Saturday session or a member of staff who has known a young person for years. Most of what we call mentoring here does not look like mentoring at all. It looks like football on a Tuesday evening, a coding class on a Saturday afternoon, and the conversations that happen naturally around both. That is deliberate. Newham is a young, diverse borough, and one of the most deprived in London, and plenty of our members are already dealing with more at eleven or twelve than most adults deal with in a year. What they need from us is not a lecture. It is somewhere steady to come back to every week.
Why purpose matters
We build purpose into our mentoring because we have seen what happens when a young person does not have any. Close to forty five percent of children in Newham grow up below the poverty line, well above the London average, and a lot of our members are already carrying responsibilities that come with that. A young person who feels like nothing they do really matters is far more likely to struggle with their mental health, to drift away from school, and to go looking for a sense of belonging somewhere far less safe than a youth club. Purpose is one of the few things that pushes back against all three at once.
Young people who have a mentor in their life tend to see real gains in how they think of themselves, how motivated they feel day to day, and how ready they are for work when the time comes. What we are actually building underneath all of that is fairly simple. A young person who thinks reasonably well of themselves. Someone who can find their footing in whatever room they walk into. At least one relationship they genuinely trust. A feeling that they are still growing rather than stuck. Some real say over their own life. And something worth aiming for. None of that comes from a worksheet. It comes from showing up, week after week, in a five-a-side game or a coding session, until a young person starts to believe it themselves.
Purpose is also the piece of a young person's wellbeing most closely tied to their mental health. When a young person gets to put real effort into something, whether that is finally beating a five-a-side rival or getting a piece of code to actually run, they tend to carry less of the low mood and anxiety that so many of our members arrive with. That matters here specifically, in a borough where safe spaces to just be a teenager are not exactly common.
It works on the body too. Regular football, dodgeball and multi-sport sessions bring stress down in a way that shows up as better sleep and, over the years, a lower risk of things like high blood pressure. For members whose home life is loud or unpredictable, an hour of running around with people who are genuinely pleased to see them can do more than any amount of talking.
And it shows up at school. A young person who feels a genuine sense of control over their own life tends to do better in the classroom, and that effect is strongest for young people growing up in poverty, which is the reality for a large share of our members. Once a member starts to feel real mastery on the pitch or behind a keyboard, that confidence rarely stays there. It follows them into the classroom too.
None of this is really one thing on its own. Helping a young person build a sense of purpose touches almost every part of their life, which is why it sits at the centre of how we mentor young people in Newham.
Support through sport and skills, not sit-down sessions
Mentoring at Youth Active rarely looks like a sit-down conversation. It happens on the pitch, on the dodgeball court, and at a keyboard during our coding classes. A mentor here might be the coach running a warm-up, the volunteer sitting next to a member while they debug their first line of code, or the staff member who notices, before anyone says a word, that someone is having an off week.
Sport gives us a natural way into a young person's physical health without it ever feeling like a health intervention. Football, multi-sport and dodgeball sessions build fitness and decent habits, but just as important, they give a young person a reason to leave the house on a Tuesday evening and burn off whatever they walked in carrying from school or from home.
The emotional side develops through the same games rather than a separate chat about feelings. Losing a match without storming off, getting back up after a hard tackle, or having another go at a level you have already failed twice teaches a young person how to cope with setbacks far better than simply being told to. Self-belief grows the same way. A young person who could not manage ten keepy-ups in September and can do fifty by June has proof of their own progress sitting right in front of them, and that lands very differently to being told well done.
Our coding classes build the same things from another direction. Debugging a program that refuses to run teaches patience in much the same way a missed shot on goal does, and getting to the point where something you built actually works, whether that is a small website or a simple game, gives a young person something they can point to and say, I made that. For members who are not into sport, this is often where their self-belief grows fastest.
Whether a young person finds their footing through sport or through code, the outcome we are working towards is the same. We want them to leave a session a little steadier than they arrived, for reasons they can feel and point to themselves, not because we told them to feel that way.
What this looks like at Youth Active
Not every young person who walks through our door wants to learn anything. Some have been badly let down by school, and a fair few have quietly decided that learning is not for people like them. We do not push. We build the relationship first, on the pitch or in a session, and only once there is real trust do we start looking for the activity that turns that reluctance into curiosity. For a lot of our members, that has been our coding classes, a genuinely useful skill, taught somewhere that does not feel anything like a classroom, that slowly turns “I don't want to learn” into “I want to get better at this.”
For other members, sport gets there first. A young person who will not sit still for a conversation will often open up mid-game, or on the walk back from a session, in a way they never would sitting across a table from an adult. We follow whichever door opens first, sport or code, and either way we are working towards the same thing: a young person in Newham who feels a little more capable, and a little more able to handle whatever comes next, than they did before they started coming to us.
For our mentors
Purpose is a journey you take together.
Our mentors support young people in Newham physically and mentally, mostly through sport and our coding classes, helping them build the kind of steadiness that holds up outside a session too. If you have a question about how any of this applies to a young person you are working with, speak to your coordinator or get in touch.