Same Difference: 25 Years of International Youth Volunteering by The Daneford Trust

The Daneford Trust was created in 1981 by McMillan’s former music teacher, Tony Stevens, at Daneford Secondary Boys School (whose alumni include the Kray Twins and the boxer Michael Watson), in Bethnal Green, after he took a group of teachers and students to Lesotho and Botswana, in Southern Africa.

With the Trust, students raise their own funding, and during the trip they make connections with local students through volunteer youth work. This provides a model for future youth work placements across Africa, Asia, Caribbean for young people from culturally diverse backgrounds, who might not otherwise have opportunities to travel internationally. There are also mutual exchanges with young from these countries also visiting the UK on similar volunteer youth work placements. The book included oral history testimonies from some of the 300 young people the Daneford Trust has supported over 25 years of of international youth volunteering. 

“…, the Daneford Trust, a perfect example of grassroots youth work and development has been banging away in a corner of East London. Ideals of equality, human rights, diversity and cooperation have been some of its guiding philosophy. I am honoured to be associated with the Trust, sharing in its ideology....” Jon Snow (Broadcaster)

“The strength of the Daneford Trust is that it involves so closely the young people of this country, and mainly of it’s cities, in the most constructive fellowship with young people in Africa, Asia and The Caribbean and elsewhere. If we are to have a healthy society in the world as it is, it must always begin at the human level and in this country ‘small is beautiful’.” 

Archbishop Trevor Huddleston (founding patron), 1981

“…Now that I am back in England, I want to use my experience and keep it alive so that it does not become wasted… this is why it is comforting to know that coming back does not have to be the end, but a beginning.”

Diana Evans – Volunteer in St. Vincent & The Grenadines (1993) and winner of the Orange Award for New Writers in 2005 for her first novel 26a.