Minister O’Gorman launches UBU Resilience and Effectiveness Initiative

The Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, Roderic O'Gorman, T.D., today launched a new initiative to support youth services working with disadvantaged, marginalised and vulnerable young people under the UBU Your Place Your Space scheme. The initiative will help to support smaller youth services to increase their youth work provision and also benefit organisations that have been facing cost pressures, including those that have seen a reduction in service provision in recent years.

The funding is to support UBU Your Place Your Space services to deliver a more efficient and comprehensive service to young people, while ensuring that these organisations have sufficient resilience to operate effectively in the medium to long term.

A total of €800,000 has been set aside for this initiative which will be operated through the Education and Training Boards, who hold the key mid-level governance responsibility for the UBU scheme.

Minister O’Gorman commented:

Youth services will be able to lodge an expression of interest with their local Education and Training Board if they are eligible to do so under the Initiative. Successful services will see an increase in their base funding to support further service provision to young people or to address the cost pressures faced.

ENDS

Funding provided under the UBU Resilience and Effectiveness Initiative will support youth services that are eligible under one of the following three categories:

1. Funded organisations that are experiencing cost pressures outside their control where efforts to identify other means to reduce this effect have been exhausted.

2. Funded organisations that are experiencing cost pressures outside their control which have previously been addressed by reducing service provision.

3. Funded organisations with limited youth worker provision (less than two WTE workers) where an increase in youth work hours would benefit service provision.

• Each ETB must allocate funding against at least one of the categories provided but is not required to allocate funds against more than one.
• Each ETB is expected to prioritise these categories according to local need.
• A total of €800,000 has been allocated to the UBU Resilience and Effectiveness Initiative. This funding will be distributed across all 16 ETBs based on number of UBU Funded Organisations within each ETB functional area and the allocation amounts in each ETB area.
• Expressions of interest are open to all organisations funded under the UBU Your Place Your Space scheme, if eligible under one of the three categories.
• The deadline for expression of interest submissions to the ETB is Friday, 02 July 2021.