The sun was smiling down on Coventry Youth Activists’ (CYA) performance for youth loneliness last Saturday (25 May). CYA and their sofa were at Broadgate in the city centre to raise awareness of the troubling statistic that one in three young disabled people spend less than an hour outside of home on a Saturday. Open […]
What do an 18th century former coal storage bunker and a group of young Coventry activists have in common? Well, they’re combining next month to host a live gig like no other at the heart of the city’s Canal Basin. For those who don’t know, Coventry Youth Activists (or CYA as they’re known) are a […]
This week marks one year since the first Coventry Youth Activists (CYA) session at Grapevine. If you don’t already know, CYA is a youth democracy and citizenship group that raises awareness of barriers in society faced by young disabled people – galvanising their response as a campaigns group. In just one year, they have grown […]
Grapevine’s beliefs ground how we implement our strategy. Read these below. Relationships are the foundation of change Showing up consistently, listening without an agenda and staying with people through difficulty, creates the trust that makes everything else possible. People have strengths Working from what people can do builds lasting confidence, capacity and self-belief, and lets […]
When Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced plans to ban access to social media for under 16s last week, he stated the government was taking decisive action to give children their childhoods back. Our Coventry Youth Activists (CYA) strongly disagree. They don’t believe they will be getting anything back — rather, a vital lifeline to the […]
We have welcomed two new members to our Grapevine team in recent weeks and we thought you’d like to meet them! First we have a new Senior Operations Officer, Lucy Gilbert, who joins us from working in the NHS and more recently as a Lived Experience Lead for a community interest company called Neurodiverse Connection. […]
We have been marking our 30th anniversary throughout 2025 with a series of blogs reflecting on how what we have learned during three decades of strengthening people, sparking community and shifting power—deep social change—informs our work and the lens through which we see solutions to our problems today. Three key principles underpin our work: ‘Bottom […]
Grapevine’s work illustrates how people and communities can meet one another’s needs, claim power and take action on what matters to them—transforming services and systems along the way. During 2025, we’re marking three decades by sharing our story of how we’ve gone from a small single-issue charity to an organisation at the centre of work […]
Voters in some parts of England head to the polling stations tomorrow (1 May) to elect councillors and in some cases, mayors. These are the first local elections since the general election last summer. Although Coventry isn’t part of the process on this occasion (but neighbouring Warwickshire is), our Coventry Youth Activists (CYA) are taking […]