Whether delegates had just arrived or already had a good day with us yesterday, we welcomed them warmly. If this was their first day, there was lots for them to catch up with.

We greeted our exhibitors on their second day with us.

Care4Children

Price Slater Gawne

Loudmouth Education & Training

Caldecott Foundation

AlterEgo

We highlighted the messages from yesterday for our new arrivals, the past year’s focus on the vulnerability of adolescence today, the involvement of parents as partners, disruption of perpetrators, changing culture and attitude and ensuring we meet the needs of those aged 16 to 18yrs moving into adult services through our direct engagement with more than 95 local authorities.  How yesterday we clearly heard the links to missing, extremism, modern slavery and human trafficking.

It is clear we have witnessed a national move towards not seeing sexual exploitation as a single issue to be addressed, but to incorporate the lessons learnt from that journey leading to where we are today and using that knowledge to help tackle todays issues of wider exploitation.

Recognising there are similarities and differences across diverse forms of exploitation, like recruitment, grooming, threat of violence and coercion, national not just local issues and under reporting from victims, parents and professionals are some of the similarities, whilst the level of violence, the gender focus and the organised nature are different. And still learning from that journey the importance at seizing that ‘window of opportunities’ to effectively engage with a young person at that critical moment in time.

It was with great pleasure we introduced

Dr Alison Gardner who leads the Human Rights Lab here in Nottingham University and shared with us the focus they have on developing Slavery Free cities. 17 different models of slavery from CSE to criminal exploitation to organ harvesting and how we might start to create slave free cities.

Evan Jones of St Giles Trust, a charity that supports ex-offenders and other vulnerable groups and will share their work on young people involved in gangs, county lines and criminal exploitation.

Our request on delegates leaving today was to stay in touch with each other, supporting each other through our network if you can’t get in touch with each other directly.

Let us know what you are doing so we can share it.

Thank you to KC Jones for making this event run so smoothly and efficiently. Rebecca, Kay Laura and the team are always a delight to work with and also to East Midlands Conference AV team here who have been so accommodating to last minute changes.

Thank you to East Midlands Conference Centre, it’s a fabulous venue to run this event in, as I’m sure you will all agree.

As CEO you don’t often get the chance to publicly thank your team for their tremendous work. Everyday they always greet requests from you with a real commitment to help you, find solutions and work with you. So on behalf of those here today as representatives of our bigger network and the young people you in turn support, I convey A BIG THANK YOU to the my NWG Team, you are each amazing in your own area of work. Thank you.

Lastly it fell to me to say thank to everyone for coming, we took the opportunity to thank all those attending for making our world a better place and for sharing knowledge, experiences and friendship. We’ve enjoyed your company.

In the words of Nelson Mandela

“There can be no greater revelation of society’s soul than the way it treats its children “

I hope you all had a safe journey home and stay in touch, tell us your news, share your challenges and lets us help if we can.

Sheila Taylor MBE CEO

27.03.19