"We can’t change the world unless we change ourselves."

A passion for making his community a better place has earned a Community Star award for Damian Tatar.

Damian, from Bradford, has won the Young Active Citizens Award - 17 to 25.

Damian’s nominator described him as “dedicated and reliable” and said he had a passion for helping his community to be a better place. 

They said: “He has outstanding leadership skills to encourage his peers to get involved with things out of their comfort zone that they wouldn’t usually do. He has a good understanding of his community and their needs and has worked towards community cohesion in his area.”

The nominator added: “This young person helped to organise a group of young people from his area, to work on a project to do a mural in his community centre, a podcast and also helped apply for funding to enable this to happen. The issues he wanted to address were making his community safer, cleaner and a better place to be for future generations."

The nomination said Damian does not want other people to grow up in the same environment as he did, but wants it to be better for future generations.

It continued: “The most recent project that Damian worked on was doing a mural on his community centre wall saying ‘We can’t change the world unless we change ourselves’.

"The idea behind it is, the first key to change is to become the change that you want to see.

“He encouraged his peers to get involved and leave a legacy in the community centre. The group that designed and came up with the idea for the mural are from the Roma community, and often face racism within their area. By having this mural on the wall that they made, helps them to know that the community centre is somewhere that they belong and are welcomed.

“It is also great for the rest of the community to see young people be a part of something positive.

“The mural has already received lots of compliments from the community including people saying ‘It’s great to see young people taking pride in the community centre’.”

The Young Active Citizens Aged 17-25 award celebrates youth volunteers who have helped others in and around Bradford District.

Community Stars Awards winners

You can find out about this year's winners by clicking each award category below.