Building Self Belief (BSB) is a charity whose core focus is helping vulnerable young people. They are part of our Let's Get Digital Durham project, which supports organisations to help others with digital skills. And they've found it has a had a transformative effect on their work.
We spoke to Peter Thomas, one of the founders of BSB and Shauna Nixon, [shauna's title?] about how the Champion training has helped their organisation and changed the way they think about digital...
Building Self-Belief (BSB) is a community-based charity in Consett, County Durham. Since their launch in 2018, they’ve supported over 8,000 vulnerable young people
Their core focus is on strengthening communities by building self-belief in young people aged 9–24 from disadvantaged backgrounds. Many of them are facing significant challenges around issues like mental health, poverty, domestic circumstances, anti-social behaviours, low self-esteem and future aspirations.
Many of the communities BSB work with are in the bottom 20% on the National Index of Multiple Deprivation. In 2023, 38.7% of children in County Durham lived in poverty (compared to 27% nationally). And 20% were living in absolute poverty.
BSB offer all sorts of support. “We provide a range of mental health, employability, local heritage and environmental programmes that give people the opportunity to maximise their potential and fully engage with their local communities” says Shauna.
They run youth clubs, have a warm space provision and a community garden too. They've also provided over £80,000 in direct household support to help families cope with the cost-of-living crisis.
BSB were already doing some work around digital skills but they knew they needed more support and training to tackle the problem of digital exclusion and isolation.
So they signed up to Let’s get Digital, Durham, a project funded by Capgemeni and run by us. We offer organisations free membership of the Digital Champions Network to train staff or volunteers to become Digital Champions who help others with digital skills. We also provide a local project co-ordinator to help organisations get their projects up and running, sign-post to new opportunities and link people up with other like-minded groups.
BSB were one of the the first organisations to sign up to the project. Their first Champions did their training in XXXXX and by XXX, were starting to help others with digital skills.
Most Digital Champions at BSB are aged 18-24. Initially their digital skills support was targeted tat the older generation, who may have missed out on learning these skills, as part of a wider project to tackle isolation called Know your Neighbourhood.
They're been helping people get onto the NHS app, find health information, connect with friends and family on social media, and even learn how to use basic editing software.
It’s a double win. Their work hugely benefits the people they’re helping – but it also helps the Champions themselves. We know that it improves the Champion's own digital skills and their employability (through practicing skills like soft listening). It also helps people in other ways, with the genuine satisfaction that can come from helping others, making connections and being an active part of the community.
The ripple effect has been huge. We’ve seen increased confidence, independence, and curiosity from people who may have previously felt excluded from the digital world. We’re now making sure digital support is available across all of our services — whether it's one-to-one help, group sessions, or informal peer learning
BSB already knew some of the negative effects that a lack of digital skills had in the communities they served. But they now approach digital skills not as a stand-alone issue, but as a cross-cutting factor in tackling poverty, health inequality and social isolation.
For example, life expectancy is falling across Country Durham. Shauna says “it’s clear that lack of digital access, skills and confidence goes on to affect health based outcomes across our community… This highlights the importance of early intervention based work to prevent this from further widening this health gap."
Digital Champion support is now woven into other services that BSB run. These include outreach programmes like:
And we've supported BSB to reach out to local funders and organisations like Point North and the Bernicia Foundation for help securing digital equipment, staffing and space to deliver their sessions.
Please can we have 2 lines about what these guys are doing! (they are learning to set up on LinkedIn - so is it eg: "As part of a session on finding work, people learn to create their profiles on LInkedin."
Digital Unite's support has had a genuinely transformative impact on our work. It’s not just about helping us with digital access- it’s about opening our eyes to how digital inclusion can become a core part of everything we do.
Building Self-Belief have used the Let Get Digital training to maximum effect – to expand their services, build internal capacity, and respond to growing community demand. And they've embraced it in a way that has enhanced all their services.
They recently renovated a former dance studio into a fully functioning community hub.They plan to expand their digital work from their new hub offering dedicated digital sessions. Peter says "the 'Let's Get Digital Durham' programme inspired us to set part of our weekly programme of community support aside for digital isolation based support and the downstairs space is being designed with future digital isolation support at its core."
With strong foundations and a committed team, they’re well placed to scale their impact, support more people, and build even stronger, digitally confident communities. We're pleased to say that Let's Get Digital Durham has been funded for another year well in to 2026, and we're excited and proud to work with them on the next steps!
The training that we have received has allowed us to significantly improve our digital based skills, which has in turn increased our level of programme delivery and enabled us to reach many hundreds more families in need.