Reaching Great Yarmouth's Hardest-to-Reach Communities
In 2025–26, GYUP's members came together to deliver a £20,000 cancer awareness programme reaching people who are too often missed by mainstream health messaging — including non-English speakers, people experiencing homelessness, and isolated residents across Great Yarmouth.
What our members did
This programme only worked because so many different organisations across our network put their own expertise, time and trust into it. The Mosque ran sessions during Ramadan for separate men's and women's congregations, with multilingual interpreters. Mandalay Wellbeing CIC delivered training directly to people experiencing homelessness. The Bread Kitchen CIC reached 36 adults through community education sessions, including neurodivergent and homeless participants. Pyrovision at the Louise Hamilton Centre ran creative sessions where people could talk openly about health, screening and bereavement.
Between them, our members trained 107 Cancer Screening Champions across 11 events — local people equipped to have informal, trusted conversations about screening within their own communities, in the places people already feel safe.
To reach residents in their own language, members and volunteers produced 54 cancer screening videos across 18 languages, including Arabic, Bangla, Chinese, Kurdish, Pashto, Polish, Somali, Tamil, Ukrainian and Urdu — translations provided largely by community members themselves.
What people told us
"The training offered valuable insight into the importance of cancer screening and gave me greater knowledge and confidence to support and encourage others."
"The trainers went well beyond what anyone might have expected. A fantastic effort for the whole community."
Feedback response rates were high — 82% from Champions, 100% from Trainers and Event Organisers — and have already shaped how future sessions are planned.
What it achieved
The £20,000 grant was matched by a huge amount of donated time and goodwill from across our membership — programme management alone represented around £28,800 of freely given effort. As the project team put it: if just one person discovers early signs of a preventable cancer because of this work, the investment is recouped many times over.
This is what GYUP exists to do: bring our members' individual strengths together so the whole community benefits more than any one organisation could achieve alone.