GambleAware is a UK-based charity that seeks to help problem gamblers overcome their problems. Now, they are extending that help into younger age categories with a new plan to launch a youth education hub aimed at preventing problem gambling when young, before it turns into a larger problem.
The new initiative from GambleAware is designed to build on the success of its Scottish Gambling Education Hub Service. The Scottish hub service is operated by the Edinburgh youth work organization, Fast Forward, and provides gambling resources to Scottish youth, and youth workers and organizations, to either help them combat growing problems, or help them avoid problems with gambling all together.
The new initiative seeks partners to deploy similar youth network hubs across the UK. The new hubs, planned for the England and Wales, are designed to provide resources to youth sector workers including work, family and formal education services, on the risks and harms of gambling.
Intended as an add-on service to its existing resources aimed at adults with gambling issues, GambleAware has committed £2.5 million in funding for the new hubs. The organization is seeking partners to help it develop and deploy the hubs in their intended markets.
Request for Proposals to Build Hubs
In a statement along with the announcement, GambleAware made clear its intentions for the new initiative. “As a result of the training, youth practitioners, teachers and youth organizations should have an increased awareness and understanding of the risks related to gambling and the impact of gambling harms, as well as what services are available to young people.”
GambleAware is not planning to develop and deploy the hubs on its own. Instead, the charity is looking for partners to take over the development of the new services, mimicking the arrangement with Fast Forward in Scotland, who operates the successful Scottish youth hub, which serves as a model for the new services.
To aid in that partnership, GambleAware is putting its money where its mouth is with £2.5 million in funding for the project. The charity expects bidding partners to be able to demonstrate the involvement of “lived experience of gambling harms” as part of the design for the new training products.
Further, the charity will be looking at the diversity and inclusion policies of the bidding organizations to ensure the new hubs can reach as many people as possible, and are designed from a wide variety of perspectives. New Chief Executive of GambleAware, Zoë Osmond, has been making a lot of bold moves to widen the service of the charity across the UK.
She has pushed a lot of expansion of its training and education resources across its networks to strengthen its efforts to combat problem gambling. The new youth hub initiative is in addition to the recently announced £4 million in funding to help launch and establish the UK’s first Academic Research Hub designed to research the societal impacts and harms of problem gambling.
GambleAware is making bold moves to help combat problem betting across the United Kingdom. The new youth hub initiative is just one of the big plans on the books for the charity organization. If you, or anyone you know, has a problem with betting or gambling, there is help. GambleAware.org has resources available to help, and has big plans to help even more people as time goes on.
