Welcome to this month's edition
Good morning! April was another great month for the VERU and partners.
Earlier this month, we had the pleasure of welcoming Youth Endowment Fund Executive Director, Jon Yates, to HQ. Jon heard directly from our incredible team including our YIS Team Coordinator Tasha Case and Lead Public Health Analyst Ade Abitoye, before JP, from Boxing Saves Lives, joined us virtually to talk about his work with the VERU. A huge thank you to Jon for joining us, the team for their work and of course the wonderful JP for making time to speak to us.
Also this month, I was delighted to join Central Bedfordshire's Exploitation and Missing Coordinator, Mia Tomlinson, in delivering a briefing to GP’s on Exploitation & Contextual Safeguarding. We have a number of sessions booked throughout the year, which I'm looking forward to. I would like to extend my thanks to Mia for her support and the GP’s for attending the briefing.
Looking forward, the team and I are excited to attend and speak at the first ever Youth Conference later this week, hosted by Police and Crime Commissioner, Festus Akinbusoye. We're extremely honoured to have been able to make contact with and invite Aliyah Morgan to share her experiences at the conference too. Late last year Aliyah featured in BBC documentary, Hidden Girls, which highlights the unseen life of young girls groomed and exploited by criminal gangs. This is a fantastic initiative that the Commissioner has committed to, and we're confident it will have an incredible impact on the young people across our county.
Finally I would like to say a huge thank you to Link to Change for partnering with us on a number of school deliveries. During these inputs, Link to Change reached more than 1000 students over the course of 22 sessions that covered Online Safety, County Lines, CSE and CCE, as well as Gang and Exploitation awareness. Amazing work!
I hope you enjoy reading through this months VERU in View.
Lisa Robinson | Interim VERU Manager
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