Join our Creative & Campaigns Group

To join the group, you must:  

• be a young person from the UK who was diagnosed with cancer aged 13-24 
• have received support from Teenage Cancer Trust
• EITHER have finished cancer treatment within the last two years, OR you can join if you’re still on treatment, as long as you feel well enough to regularly participate.
• If you’re under 18, you’ll need a parent, guardian or appropriate adult to give consent for you to be a member.
• After you apply to join, we’ll check in with your clinical team to make sure they agree that you’re well enough to take part.
• We welcome and encourage young people who are disabled, LGBTQ+, People of Colour and/or have a religious belief to take part.   
• If you have a disability and would like us to make reasonable adjustments to enable you to take part, please let us know – we will meet your needs wherever possible.

There are four ways to get involved, and you can choose some or all of them.

Be a storyteller. Everyone has a story to tell. Talk to our team and share your experience to help people understand what it’s like to go through cancer when you’re young. 

Once you’ve shared your story with us, we’ll look for opportunities to share it in many ways such as on our website, on social media, in adverts or with the media (i.e. online news, newspapers and magazines). 

Be a creator. Writer, filmmaker, photographer, illustrator, TikTok-er – however you like to get creative, we’d love to work with you on content for our website, email and social media.  

There may also be opportunities to take part in social media takeovers, live streams or coverage at events. We’ll provide you with feedback and advice along the way, and we’d love to hear your content ideas and topic suggestions too. 

Be a consultant. To make sure our communications are effective, appropriate and current, it’s important that we listen to your views. 

We could ask you to feedback on our next campaign theme or creative ideas. You could be asked to review draft messaging. We might send you a short poll or survey to complete to support our media work. Or we may ask you to suggest things that we could and should be doing in our marketing. 

Be a campaigner. Work with us to shape our policy and campaigning activity, from what issues we campaign on, to what calls to action we make to UK Parliaments or the NHS. 

There will be plenty of opportunities for you to have your say, from quick surveys to focus groups, through to meeting with decision makers and sharing your experiences directly. 

However you decide to get involved, you’ll learn new skills and gain insights into the charity and marketing & communications sectors. You can also put your membership on your CV or LinkedIn to boost your profile. 

If you don’t have access to what you need, e.g. access to a smartphone or laptop to create content, we’ll look at how we can support with supplying equipment. 

We’ll share regular updates on the impact your work is having, and do everything we can to make sure that membership is a positive, fulfilling and appropriate experience for you. This includes communicating clearly with you and looking out for your safety and wellbeing in line with our safeguarding statement. 

The Creative & Campaigns Group is brand new for 2022, and we’re very excited about it! In summer 2022 we are running a pilot version of the group, before recruiting members more widely later in the year.

No, there’s no limit to the number of young people who can get involved, as long as you meet the criteria and your clinical team feel that you’re in the right place to take part. Once your application is approved, we’ll try and match you up with the opportunities that are most interesting and relevant to you. 

No, applications will continually be open to anyone eligible. 

We are looking for young people who can commit to a minimum of three months. The standard length of membership of up to is two years. However, members can stop at any time. 

No, participation in the Group is on a voluntary basis and it is not a paid opportunity. 

We’ll email you about ways you can get involved approximately once every 1-3 weeks. The exact number will vary depending on the number of projects happening. We won’t ever send you more than two requests per week in relation to the group’s work.

Members will only receive requests for the type/s of role they have chosen to get involved with (storyteller, creator, consultant and/or campaigner). 

Ideally you’ll do at least one task per month, depending on what you feel able to do and are interested in. 

No, most tasks you’ll do as a member of the Group will be completed individually. 

There may be some requests, such as focus groups, where a meeting is required to discuss ideas. This will be made clear at the time of request. Members are not required to take part in any group discussions if they don’t want to. 

Please note that the Creative & Campaigns Group is not a peer-to-peer support group for young people to share their experiences with each other. If you are looking to connect with others who’ve been through cancer, do have a look at our events for young people, or speak to your clinical team, Teenage Cancer Trust Nurse or Youth Support Coordinator who may be able to point you towards further support.  
 

The Youth Advisory Group (YAG) is made up of approximately 30 young people who work together to shape all areas of the charity’s work, from recruiting members of our senior leadership team to creating our new strategy and improving our services. They have volunteered to be part of YAG for two years and are committed to meeting regularly as a group. 

On the other hand, the Creative & Campaigns Group operates only within the Marketing and Communications department with a focus on content, campaigns, media and policy work. Members can contribute regularly but don’t need to make a long-term commitment. They volunteer on an individual level rather than as a collective group. It doesn’t require commitments to meetings and is done on a more ad hoc basis. 

We recommend that people don’t sign up to both YAG and the Creative & Campaigns Group, so that we can have different people in each group and include lots of young people’s voices across all our projects. However, if you’re an existing YAG member and also want to get involved in our Creative & Campaigns work, you can do so as long as you’re confident you’ll have enough time to commit to both.