History

Integrate Youth for Christ is the next phase in the growth of local Christian youth work that had been formerly happening in the south Norfolk and north Suffolk areas (Upper Waveney Valley) for over 30 years.

In the mid 80's a group of people set up a local summer camp for Christian youth and their leaders - the camp became known as South Norfolk Christian Camp at Sizewell Hall - or SNOCCASH, run by Roger Pye - one of Integrate Youth for Christ's founding trustees.

intRgr8 (the forerunner to Integrate Youth for Christ) was conceived after Jonathan & Steph Richardson spent a week working at SNOCCASH. The camp was a fantastic way for local Christian young people to get together and develop relationships between themselves and with God. After the camp they felt there was an opportunity to carry on the work throughout the year by getting young people together from different churches and youth groups during the year as well, hence the name. intRgr8 was formed as a wholly voluntary organisation in 2000.

Over the years intRgr8 ran a wide range of events including worship music workshops, team building challenges, concerts and gigs, a Christmas party and a good number of intRgr8 Celebrations. The Celebration events took  the form of joint youth services hosted by a range of different churches, including the Bramerton Group (CofE), DC3 (Now We are Hope), The Vine Church (Eye), and New Life Church (Banham) - all of these have brought together youth musicians from the different churches to form a band to lead the worship.

As intRgr8 grew we started running various missions in the local high schools using Youth for Christ Mission Teams. It was as a result of running these, the need for paid staff, and the need to raise funds that we started taking the steps to turn the voluntary intRgr8 into the formally founded charity Integrate Youth for Christ - commissioned by British Youth for Christ in October 2009.

We were formally recognised as a charity in Feb 2010, and appointed Steph Richardson as our part time Centre Director. Since then we have grown out of our first office in the Diss URC and now have a much larger office in Diss Methodist Church. We now employ four more part time workers and have greatly increased our work with churches and schools, launched our termly youth worship event, Encounter, as well as taking over the former Snoccash camp to become Integrate Youth for Christ Camp and then partnering with other local Youth for Christ centres to become Encounter Camp.