The Youth Development Team is part of the Fire Service. It is a relatively small team of people that are involved with delivering development and engagement programmes to young people within communities across the county. Over the past three years we have mainly been based in King’s Lynn and in 2005 moved some of our work into the Thetford area. In this time have built solid links with local community organisations, schools, other service providers.

Why do we get involved with this kind of work?

The work we carry out contributes towards our primary objective of making Norfolk safer and does this in a number of ways:-

• Preventative, we hope that by engaging with young people we can alter negative attitudes and modify behaviour such as fire setting and tendencies to activities that results in the service being required to carry out rescue operations.
  
  
• Educational, by spending time with young people of a wide range of ages and abilities, we can increase their understanding about behaviour and consequence. This spans from fire safety knowledge to cultural problems that manifest into nuisance, uncontrollable and sometimes dangerous behaviour. By advising and educating people we can penetrate into societies where cycles of behaviour are hard to break down.
  
  
• Benefits our communities, there are a wide range of benefits to the communities within which we work, ranging from altering attitudes and behaviour of people in their communities, creating opportunities for gaining new skills and employment, improving existing environments.
  
  
• Promotes the work of the Fire Service, The work we carry out is fairly high profile going in local newsletters, papers, on the news and discussed in a large network of organisations. By encouraging people to talk about services we provide will endorse our aim of being a caring and rounded organisation.

For information on our Youth engagement incentives please call
Rob on 07919492294 or
Michelle on 07789715983
Email princes.trust@fire.norfolk.gov.uk