Refugee Youth Service grew from a small youth space in the informal camp settlement in Calais known as “The Jungle”. Thousands of people were living there in tents and makeshift shelters, separated from the UK by fences, police, the port and the English Channel. Among them were hundreds of children travelling without parents or carers.

What began as a short period of volunteering became a sustained response. The youth space, known as Baloo’s, offered warmth, games, food and something less easily measured: trusted adults who remembered children’s names and were there again the following day.

The work developed quickly, often before the people doing it fully understood what it required. Supporting children in the camp was not simply a matter of kindness or enthusiasm. It involved safeguarding, trauma, legal systems, cultural understanding, boundaries and relationships carrying needs that no small organisation could resolve alone.

When the Jungle was demolished in October 2016, the physical centre of the work disappeared. Children were taken to reception centres across France, while others continued arriving in northern France. The camp had closed, but the conditions that had produced it had not. RYS therefore made its first major organisational decision: to remain.

After the Jungle was demolished, children in northern France became less visible rather than less vulnerable. They were dispersed across fields, industrial estates and smaller informal settlements. RYS replaced the fixed youth centre with a large white van, creating a mobile space where children could receive information, practical support and help entering the French child-protection system. A local social worker, legal specialist, cultural mediators and volunteers strengthened the response.

At the same time, RYS began looking beyond Calais. In Athens, growing numbers of displaced young people were living with limited access to stable, age-appropriate support. RYS establish Velos Youth, one of the first dedicated safe spaces and day centres for displaced young people on mainland Greece. Its model combined relationships and community with casework, psychosocial support, education, referrals and practical assistance.

RYS also developed work in Ventimiglia, on the French-Italian border, where people on the move faced another temporary and dangerous stopping point.

The expansion marked an important shift. RYS was no longer responding to one exceptional camp. It was becoming a multi-country organisation, following young people across different points in Europe’s migration system while trying to preserve the relational approach that had shaped its beginnings.

In 2018, RYS expanded its northern France work from Calais to Dunkirk with funding from Save the Children. Children were living across scattered informal settlements, repeatedly displaced by police clearances and exposed to violence, exploitation and dangerous attempts to reach the UK.

The expansion allowed RYS to provide mobile outreach across both locations. Teams offered practical assistance, clear information, safeguarding support and referrals into statutory and specialist services. The work relied on people with different forms of expertise, including social work, law, language, culture and local relationships.

It also exposed the limits of growth. Although Calais and Dunkirk were geographically close, they developed into distinct operating environments with their own relationships, needs and daily pressures. In reality, two teams began to form, each deeply committed to the children in its area.

The year demonstrated both what expansion could make possible and what it demanded. Reaching more children required more than adding activities or staff. It required stronger management, clearer roles, reliable funding and structures capable of holding the emotional and practical weight of the work.

Those lessons would become unavoidable the following year.

When the dedicated Dunkirk funding ended, RYS initially tried to continue working across both Dunkirk and Calais. Reducing the service felt like retreating from children whose needs had not disappeared.

But the organisation’s resources no longer matched the work it was trying to sustain. Exhaustion was growing, relationships between the two location-based teams were under strain, and staff raised concerns that the work was becoming unsafe. Each team feared that the children it supported were being deprioritised.

The decision to leave Dunkirk was therefore not simply financial. It forced RYS to confront a difficult truth: continuing a service at any cost is not always the most caring option. Work delivered beyond an organisation’s capacity eventually becomes less stable for staff and less safe for the people it exists to support.

A board member with greater distance from the daily intensity helped the organisation acknowledge that the arrangement could not responsibly continue. The feared consequences of scaling back were real, but less catastrophic than they had appeared from inside the work.

Leaving Dunkirk became an early lesson in organisational boundaries. Commitment alone could not substitute for structure, capacity or sustainable funding.

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted RYS’s work at a time when the children supported in northern France were already living with insecurity, poor access to services and limited protection. Restrictions changed how the team could operate, reducing face-to-face contact and making practical support, safeguarding and relationship-building more difficult.

The organisation had to adapt while trying to preserve the consistency and trust on which its work depended. Staff found new ways to remain in contact, share information and respond to urgent needs, even as normal routines and services were interrupted.

The year also created space for RYS to think more seriously about the future of the Calais project. A substantial multi-year grant from Comic Relief gave the organisation greater stability and the ability to plan beyond immediate delivery. Importantly, the funding made it possible to consider investing directly in a French partner rather than assuming that RYS should continue holding the work itself.

This marked a significant development in the organisation’s approach to localisation. The question was no longer only how RYS could strengthen its own project, but how its resources, relationships and learning could help build something more locally rooted and sustainable.

The pandemic made much of the work harder and more uncertain. At the same time, the security of longer-term funding allowed RYS to look beyond survival and begin preparing for a future in which the work in France might be carried by others.

By 2021, RYS had worked in Calais for five years. The project had changed repeatedly, moving from a youth centre inside the Jungle to mobile outreach, specialist casework and partnership-building across northern France.

RYS had accumulated trusted relationships, local knowledge and a strong sense of responsibility. That made leaving difficult. The work had become closely associated with the organisation, but this did not necessarily mean RYS should hold it indefinitely.

The decision was made to transfer the project to ECPAT France, a larger national organisation with specialist child-protection and anti-trafficking expertise. Rather than simply closing the service, RYS worked towards continuity, transferring learning, relationships and responsibility so that support for children could continue through a structure better placed to sustain it.

The handover reflected a wider shift in RYS’s thinking about ownership. Making space for others sometimes meant more than participation or partnership. It meant asking whether work that had grown around RYS should continue to belong to it at all.

The organisation had learned that responsible leadership was not only about starting and expanding projects. It could also involve stepping back and allowing another organisation to carry them forward.

After leaving direct service delivery in France, RYS began turning more of its experience into learning for the wider sector.

Journey with an Unaccompanied Child was developed as a training and practice-change programme for professionals supporting children arriving in the UK. It combined case insight, rights-based practice, young people’s experiences and practical tools for frontline teams.

The programme followed the different stages an unaccompanied child might encounter, including arrival, reception, safeguarding, relationships with professionals and access to services. It encouraged participants to look beyond procedures and consider how systems are experienced by the child moving through them.

This represented a new form of impact for RYS. Rather than only providing support directly, the organisation could improve the knowledge and confidence of social workers, foster carers, accommodation staff, youth workers and other practitioners who might support many children over time.

It also helped RYS recognise that its accumulated learning had value beyond the projects from which it emerged. The organisation’s experience could be documented, questioned and shared, not as a fixed formula, but as a starting point for stronger reflection and better practice.

In 2023, RYS returned to direct casework in the UK through the No Children in Hotels project.

The project supported young people who said they were children but had been placed in adult Home Office accommodation because their age was disputed. Many were navigating unfamiliar legal and safeguarding systems while living alongside adults and without the protections normally available to children.

RYS provided relationship-based support alongside practical casework. This included liaison with local authorities, access to legal advice, safeguarding follow-up, wellbeing support and help entering education and other services.

The work was complex and required the organisation to develop new knowledge quickly. The route from being treated as an adult to being recognised and supported as a child was fragmented, while much responsibility initially rested with a small number of staff.

The project carried forward many of RYS’s longstanding principles: relationship before intervention, clear information, accompaniment rather than rescue, and persistent advocacy within systems that young people often struggled to understand. It also reinforced the need for strong supervision, shared responsibility and organisational structures capable of supporting the people doing demanding casework.

Velos Youth had been created in Athens in 2017 with the intention that it would ultimately become locally led and independent from RYS.

That transition took years. It required much more than changing a name or transferring administrative responsibility. Local leadership needed time to develop, while financial systems, governance, safeguarding processes, partnerships and organisational identity all had to become strong enough to stand independently.

By 2024, Velos Youth was fully autonomous. It had grown from an RYS-supported initiative into an established Greek organisation with its own leadership and direction.

The transition became one of the clearest expressions of RYS’s commitment to making space for others. RYS had supported the development of staff leadership, organisational systems and governance structures, but the achievement belonged to the people who took responsibility for Velos Youth and continued reshaping it around the realities of Athens.

Autonomy did not mean that the relationship or shared history disappeared. It meant that ownership had genuinely shifted. Velos Youth could make decisions, build partnerships and define its future without RYS remaining at the centre.

For RYS, this was not the loss of a project. It was the intended outcome of one.

By 2025, RYS had spent almost a decade responding, adapting and rebuilding. It had moved from a small space in the Jungle to projects across four countries, specialist UK casework and training for frontline professionals.

The organisation could have continued searching for another version of itself. There were still needs to address and worthwhile projects that could be imagined. But the existence of need was not, by itself, a reason for RYS to continue indefinitely.

The board and leadership considered the organisation’s purpose, financial position, scale and future direction. They also considered what it would mean to keep sustaining an organisation partly because of its history, identity and the difficulty of letting it end.

The decision to close was not based on the belief that the work had failed or was no longer valuable. It recognised that organisations do not have to survive forever to have succeeded. Sometimes the responsible choice is to complete the work that remains, support staff and young people carefully, preserve what has been learned and bring the organisation to a deliberate end.

Closure therefore became a final organisational project, requiring the same attention to relationships, responsibility and care that RYS had tried to bring to its frontline work.

RYS entered 2026 knowing that it would be its final year.

The priority was not simply to stop delivering services. It was to end relationships and responsibilities carefully. Young people needed clear information and planned closure. Staff required support through uncertainty, transition and the loss of roles that had carried personal as well as professional meaning. Funders and partners needed honest communication, while governance, finances and legal responsibilities had to be completed properly.

RYS also began capturing what might otherwise disappear with the organisation. The Learning Hub, archive, Insights, Practice Guides and Tools were created to preserve learning developed through ten years of frontline experience. The intention was not to present RYS as a perfect model. It was to share stories, questions, mistakes and practices that might remain useful to others.

Ending well did not mean making the ending painless or tying every experience into a neat conclusion. Some relationships could not continue. Some questions remained unresolved. Some aspects of the organisation’s history were still open to different interpretations.

But closure could still be thoughtful, transparent and responsible. RYS began as an instinctive movement towards children who needed support. It ended by slowing down, sharing what it had learned and recognising that care includes how we leave.