NYA x The King’s Trust – Youth Work Week: Building Brighter Futures
Five young people. One Paralympian. A campaign that reached more people than ever before.
KEY POINTS
- Client: National Youth Agency (NYA) x The King’s Trust
- Job Type: Documentary, campaign film & social media content
- Location: Somerstown Community Centre, Portsmouth & surrounding community
- Featured Subject: Lorraine Lambert, British Paralympian & Youth Development Lead, The King’s Trust
- Deliverables: Hero campaign film featuring Lorraine and 5 young people, 5 individual participant story films, social media edits
- Use Case: Youth Work Week 2025 national campaign, social media, NYA & King’s Trust internal communications
- Campaign Theme: Building Brighter Futures: Safe places, trusted support, and opportunities to thrive
THE CHALLENGE
Youth Work Week is the National Youth Agency’s flagship annual campaign, celebrating the life-changing impact of youth work across England. For 2025, NYA wanted to go further than ever before, a campaign with real human stories at its heart, featuring real young people sharing their real experiences of youth work.
At the centre of it all was Lorraine Lambert. A British Paralympian who represented Great Britain at the 2016 Rio and 2020 Tokyo Paralympics, a woman whose leg was amputated in 2010 following a rock-climbing accident, and who went on to compete at the highest level in the world. A woman who considers her youth work more important than any medal. As Youth Development Lead at The King’s Trust on the South Coast, Lorraine works daily with 16 to 25 year olds who are not in education, employment or training, helping build their confidence, employability and life skills.
The challenge was telling that story alongside five of the young people Lorraine works with, each with their own deeply personal journey. Some of those stories were sensitive. Some were hard to tell. All of them mattered. The video needed to honour every single one of them while delivering a campaign powerful enough to move an entire sector.
THE PLAN
We based the production at Somerstown Community Centre in Portsmouth, filming across the community with Lorraine and the five young people involved in the campaign. From the outset, care was at the centre of every decision we made.
Directing young people sharing sensitive and deeply personal experiences is not the same as directing a corporate interview. Every participant needed to feel genuinely safe, genuinely heard and genuinely in control of their own story before a camera was ever pointed at them. We took the time that was needed. We created an environment where they could speak honestly without pressure. The professionalism of the entire crew on those shoot days was non-negotiable, because the young people in front of the lens deserved nothing less.
We filmed Lorraine’s youth work sessions with the group, capturing the relationships, the trust and the quiet but transformative work that happens in those rooms every day. We sat down with Lorraine for her own interview, drawing out not just her incredible Paralympic story but the reason she turned her back on medals to invest in young people instead. And we filmed each of the five young participants individually, giving every one of them space to tell their own story in their own words.
From all of that footage we built a suite of content. A hero campaign film bringing Lorraine and all five young people together as the centrepiece of the Youth Work Week 2025 launch. Five individual participant films, each one a standalone story. And a series of social media edits to roll out across the campaign week, maximising reach and keeping the conversation going across every platform.
THE RESULTS
Youth Work Week 2025 ran from 3 to 9 November, with the Creation DMC films sitting at the heart of the national campaign. The response was immediate. NYA colleagues, The King’s Trust team and the wider youth work sector responded with overwhelming enthusiasm, and the engagement across social media made 2025 NYA’s best ever year for Youth Work Week campaign reach and interactions.
For a campaign shining a light on a sector that has faced a 73% decline in local authority funding since 2010 and a loss of 4,500 youth workers, the films landed at exactly the right moment. They gave the campaign a human face. They gave five young people a platform. And they gave Lorraine Lambert the stage she deserved.
Some stories need to be told properly. This was one of them.
CLIENT QUOTE
“It was a pleasure to work with the team at Creation DMC on this project. We have had fantastic feedback on the films from NYA colleagues, the King’s Trust team, and the engagement online has been incredible. Our best year yet for Youth Work Week campaign reach and interactions. Thank you for everything, Klayton & Team”
Rachel Mallon, Communications Officer, National Youth Agency
Our best year yet. Those were their words. Let’s make it yours too. Book a free discovery call or email us at hi@creationdmc.com