Saeed Atcha MBE

Biography

He is the founding chief executive of Youth Leads UK, a charity he established aged 15 and has supported more than 7,000 disadvantaged young Greater Mancunians access volunteering opportunities and skills development programmes.

He was made a recipient of an MBE in Her Majesty the Queen’s New Year’s Honours List, 2019, the youngest recipient that year.

Saeed is a trustee of both youth employment charity Generation: You Employed, UK, and social mobility charity Migrant Leaders, a Non-Executive Director at social housing group Bolton at Home, an Associate Non-Executive Director at Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust, an Advisory Council Member to the Care Tech Foundation and Vice-Chair of Governors at his former secondary school, Ladybridge High School in Bolton.

Saeed also serves as Deputy Lieutenant of Greater Manchester.

Growing up in local authority care in Bolton, Saeed has extensive lived experience of the care sector and the disadvantages that young people face. This prompted him to set up Youth Leads UK to support disadvantaged young people develop their skills in order to improve their chances at social mobility.

Saeed was a trustee of HRH The Prince of Wales’ Step up to Serve which coordinates the #iwill campaign, an organisation established to increase the numbers of young people using social action as a route to improving their life chances and their community. Saeed was integral to the development of the youth voice strategy and various toolkits that are used in schools across the United Kingdom.

Saeed has led a number of youth voice projects and was co-chair of the government-commissioned Independent Review into Full-Time Social Action where Saeed developed a youth voice strategy feeding into the final report and recommendations.

In 2020, Saeed became a panel member of the Money and Pensions Service Financial Foundation Challenge Group, a cross-sector group of individuals tasked with coming up with recommendations to give two million more children and young people a meaningful financial education and boost their financial literacy skills.