Andy Thornton is Director of the Participation and Social Action Group at the Citizenship Foundation.

The Participation and Social Action group consists of Youth Act, Go Givers and Giving Nation. All these projects aim at facilitating young people in engaging with their community. Andy originally worked on the Giving Campaign as project manager of Giving Nation prior to it being moved over to the Citizenship Foundation in 2004. Giving Nation is a nationwide campaign which promotes charity and social enterprise to secondary school students. Giving Nation work usually occurs as part of the school curriculum in citizenship lessons. Further details can be found on www.g-nation.co.uk

Andy is the creater of the Giving Nation Challenge. Andy`s vision and creativity has produced an innovative project that enables secondary school students to simulate forming a charity or a social enterprise over a short period of usually five weeks. Schools are provided with £50 per class and free curriculum material to enable them to run the Challenge.

Andy is also a musican of longstanding. He toured with the band the Big Sur in the 1980s, was a co founder of the Late Late Service in the 1990s (a contemporary worship arts collective) and is still releasing music to this day as a solo artist.

Andy is very committed to Giving Nation`s continued success and is very pleased that the Challenge enables young people to be both enterprising and community orientated.