While most young people come to us for support, we want them to leave us with skills and tools to be successful in their lives. Some of the areas we intend to work on to achieve this include:

• Building power for young people to be active advocates within their communities and for themselves.

• Creating opportunities for young people to develop new skills.

• Developing more employment support - both for getting young people into jobs, and advocacy for them at their workplace.

• Utilising our corporate partnerships for opportunities for donations of knowledge and expertise in this area.

Our communities need RainbowYOUTH to be a place where they can have their whole identity seen and uplifted. We intend to focus on this over the next three years across these areas:

• Focus on partnerships and collaborations to enable intersectional work within Māori, Pacific, migrant and disabled communities.

• Prioritise multicultural responsiveness through our services and staff and volunteer training.

• Building Te Tiriti led activism in rainbow communities through education and community building.

Our regional work has emerged over the last ~6 years and we have a lot of learnings to incorporate into a sustainable model of service provision in the regions. We have three key areas to focus on:

• Development of a long term model/models of our work in the regions (led by local communities)

• Presence of regional rainbow voices in our communications, advocacy and governance

• Ongoing development of our regional services in response to the needs of local communities.

We’ve had consistent feedback that it’s hard to find out about our services, and people wish they had known earlier. We want it to be easy for young people and whānau to find out about us and get in touch. We also recognise we need to be accountable to our communities about exactly what we’re doing, and how we’re using the generous donations and funding we receive. We have a few focusses to progress this area:

• Transparency around our funding and internal work

• Proactive use of media to advocate for issues faced by rainbow young people

• Outcomes we deliver for young people are publicised

• RainbowYOUTH is visible and present in relevant spaces and events

• RainbowYOUTH resources are easily and widely accessible