John Poyton

John is co-founder and CEO of Redthread, a London-based youth outreach charity. As a trained and experienced youth worker John took the reins of Redthread in 2009. He moved from a clinical practitioner role, working one to one with high-risk vulnerable young people, to lead on the vision and strategy for the organisation. Since then, Redthread has been working in partnership with London’s major trauma centre hospitals and has youth workers embedded in the A&E teams, working with victims to break the cycle of violence. In 2014 Redthread had a team of 7 and a turnover of £300k. Now John leads a team of 30 and a turnover of £1 million and has embarked on plans to take their ground breaking model, having youth workers embedded within clinical teams, to hospitals in Nottingham and Birmingham.