Across the UK, thousands of young people grow up without access to the outdoors. Nisbah Hussain, a YHA Trustee and founder of the Muslim Youth Alliance, is part of a wider movement working to open up green spaces to youngsters from all backgrounds.
Q: You've helped thousands of young people experience the outdoors. Where did all this begin for you?
I grew up in Blackburn. My parents had very little. We lived in Lancashire, but if you look out of our house, you can see green hills everywhere. It's in the foothills of some of the loveliest landscapes in the UK, but as children, we never went there. They just were inaccessible.
Q: Your first experience of the outdoors sounds like quite a moment — what happened?
I had my first opportunities in the outdoors when I was 14 with Outdoor Pursuits Week. It was the first time we'd gone away from home. I remember on the very first night, about 10.00pm, they put us in a Range Rover, six girls and a teacher, and they dropped us off in the Yorkshire hills with a pair of boots, a map, head torches, a sleeping bag, one of those emergency foil blankets and a rucksack. They gave us two hours to find somewhere where we would be sleeping for the night. We did eventually find our way to the location on the Yorkshire Moors and we slept under the stars. I look back now and that's what instilled that initial change; it was so awe-inspiring. That's what planted the thought that we are much more capable than we think we are.
Q: You've talked about barriers growing up. How did that become a catalyst for change?
Fast forwarding to a few years later, I applied to go to Oxford. I had my interview and I didn't get in. My feedback was that academically I was on par with everybody else, but I just wasn't well-rounded enough. For somebody who had pretty much done every school club you could think of, I felt as though there wasn't much else I'd had the opportunity to do. So I've always said that I would be the change for the next generation.
I'm a fully qualified solicitor, but after I had my own children, I didn't go back to work. Then one day, with three children under the age of four, I woke up one morning and thought: "What can we do to make a difference?" My sister works in a primary school. We live in one of the highest child-poverty wards of the UK and she told me the kids have got it so much harder than we did 30 years ago. We didn't have much, but we could go and play outside. Now they don't even do that. So I googled how to set up a scout group.
Q: How did that grow into something national?
I started my own scout group in 2014. The more I did, the more I realised there weren't many people who looked like me in this space. Not many people who could advocate for the needs of young people from these communities. So I got involved nationally with scouting. When COVID hit, everybody wanted to get more diverse, but people just didn't know how to. The desire was there, the need was there, but it wasn't leading to effective change. So I thought "be the change you want to see in the world".
I set up Equalinks in May 2022. Its aims are around equality and equity, linking up national organisations with grassroots work and making sure policies actually lead to effective change. That's what led us to create the Muslim Youth Alliance in 2023.
Q: What is the Muslim Youth Alliance, and who is it for?
We launched the Muslim Youth Alliance project and now we are the largest Muslim youth network in the UK. We have 189 organisations and we span the whole youth sector: schools, mosques, madrasas, scout groups, youth groups, anybody supporting young Muslims. Overall, the organisations support about 18,000 young people on a weekly basis. Predominantly, these are young people living in the lowest 20 percentile areas of deprivation. That's where my passion is. Young people who just don't get to go anywhere, don't have access to anything. They stay in that little part of wherever they live and they sort of forget that there's a much bigger, wider world out there.
Q: How does that translate into real impact, and working with partners such as YHA?
I particularly enjoyed meeting with YHA because they weren't just talking about change. They realised the inequalities, and they've actually taken steps for that change to happen. Since December alone we've sent 1,500 young people away on funded residentials. That's 38 residentials in about four months. It's about raising the next generation of outdoor citizens.
Q: What still needs to change?
Communities are being spoken for rather than with. There's still that gap but I'm an optimist. I think things are getting better. The next five to 10 years will be a shift from one-off nature contact to real connection. And we need ecosystems of change. If someone is inspired on a break, what support is there when they go back home?
We've got a young person from Birmingham who came on one of our programmes at 16. Now he's a founder of a youth project called The Hotspot supporting young people in one of the poorest wards in the UK. They've created a safe space, tackling crime and building pathways into apprenticeships and opportunities.
There's another in Burton upon Trent. They came on an all-girls residential in Devon, and after that they started a women's walking club. Then a mums-and-daughters club. Then a full female programme. These were women who beforehand literally never left their streets. Now they've started a youth project, and they're doing more residentials.
What we've realised is that once you plant that initial seed, it flourishes.
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