From the beginning

From the beginning:- 

As a member of the Parents Association of the local village primary school I was invited along, as their representative, to the Annual Parish Meeting conducted by the Parish Council. There was a person from Wychavon giving a talk about Parish Plans and I felt it was to be a really exciting opportunity for “ordinary” people to have the opportunity to shape the future of their communities. Myself and another villager, Cathy Dunham, set about finding some like minded people to form a committee to begin the process of producing a village action plan. Once we had identified a number of people who felt the same as us we set about organising an open weekend with topic posters to aid discussions of issues that parishioners have. All the comments received from this open weekend were then used to produce a questionnaire that went to every household in the parish. A very respectable 48% return was obtained and the results analysed during 2005. These results are now being used to produce an Action plan to address some of the parishioners concerns. 

One of the issues highlighted, that was also dear to my own personal interest, was the plight of the youth in our village. Although we also have very few amenities for adults within the village, such as sports clubs etc, at least adults who have access to their own transport have the ability to go elsewhere for entertainment. Unfortunately this is not always the case for the youngsters. The nearest cinema that is accessible is in Worcester. This equates to a very expensive night out that many cannot afford because they have found money to pay for a train to Worcester, and entrance to the pictures etc. Frequently they find they cannot get back to the village at the time the cinema finishes so this again proves to be a problem for them.  

The youth frequently meet in inappropriate places and this again is a concern that I have. Disused: Disused railway sidings & quarryThey were meeting and riding their mountain bikes in a disused quarry on private land where the path ran very close to the main rail line to London. This has since been fenced off to stop them gaining access. Now they are meeting beside the cemetery and in the church porch and this is proving to be another bone of contention with local residents who object to their load music and the litter that they believe they leave behind. The solution that they wish to see is these youngsters moved on. Ok, but to where? Many appear to wish they would simply disappear and come back when they are adults!  The more I found out about the youngsters lack of support the more I felt I would like to try and help them. 

I am not sure quite how it happened but the Millenium volunteers (who came into the village to run summer play schemes for two years, and who have been greatly missed this year due to the withdrawal of funding), put me in contact with Ian Leyton from the YouthWorcs Rural team and after talking to him I felt they could offer the youth in the village the opportunity to have a say in what they wanted in their village – ie their own village plan from their perspective. Initially Ian’s team did a note drop on the school run and I put posters around the village to attract some youth into being involved in this project – “Breakfast in Paris” (see the seperate section on this). The response was fantastic with 33 youngsters attending the first meeting in the mobile cinema trailer provided by the youth service. The group split into two with the older ones forming a group to address the issue of Affordable Housing and the younger ones doing a Breakfast in Paris project. This group settled down to a regular group of 12 youngsters who regularly attended weekly meetings over 9 months to produce their presentation.   This was then presented by these young people to the Parish Council and the action plan committee to try and draw attention to their plight. Breakfast in Paris Group: Alicia Withers, Ashley Judge, Kitty Judge, Jessica Northwood, Andrew Herbert, Ashleigh Stevens, Sam Richardson, Luke Richardson, Dean Sadler, Kate Sadler

A number of these youngsters have stayed involved in youth parliaments and presentations. One youngster was praised by her teacher as being “much more confident” thanks to her involvement in these activities. This group also received the Tryangle Award for their community work and commitment. 

Partly due to this, and also because another lady (Lyn Judge) also involved with the community plan committee had previous experience of running a youth club, the youth club was set up in February 2005.  We received equipment grants and start up grants from WCVYS which made it possible to purchase equipment for the young people to use. The Youth Club has run weekly since then (although we have had to close during school holidays through lack of volunteers) and has been highly successful.

The club has joined forces with the Scouts to do a shooting evening, the Variety Club with an open day at West Midlands Safari Park, the YHA with the Do It 4 Real scheme, and it has run trips that have been educational (@Bristol), healthy/active (ice skating, paint-balling) and fun (Drayton Manor, Alton Towers). We have held craft days where youngsters have learnt skills they would most likely not have had the opportunity to do otherwise – mosaics, calligraphy, glass painting, porcelain painting, jewellery making, potters wheel etc.

Grants were applied for to provide summer activities last year from WCVYS and this enabled us to do the trips and have open days – the most successful open day being the craft day at the village hall.

This year groups of teenagers from the youthclub applied for grants from FLOSS and both groups were successful. One group asked for £2500 to provide a trip to Alton Towers, which 49 local young people went on, and 27 young people have been paintballing and 20/30 young people have been to Aztec Water sports to learn some water sports during August 2006. The other grant asked for £1400 to pay for another craft day during the summer holidays in 2006 and also purchased indoor and outdoor sports equipment for the young people to use on youth club nights.

On a serious note, they have also had drugs awareness workshops. A few of the volunteers have done training and have been awarded certificates for Youth Work Block A Training, and Basic Food Hygiene and have since been assessed to drive the landrover that the youth service lets us have the use of. Grants have been awarded to assist in these training costs. 

We also applied for an Approved Service Provider status and were successful in our bid to commission work and were awarded £23,000 over 2½ years to provide a service on behalf of the Worcestershire County Council Youth Service. This should have led to us opening a “drop in” type facility for older teenagers to self regulate in the back room of a public house (see section named Youth Project).

It was to be totally self contained, using a swipe card system to gain access to the facilities (also records attendance), and CCTV to monitor in house activities without the need for constant adult supervision. This unfortunately did not come to fruition because the landlord, who had previously agreed to us using this room, parted from his partner and a new landlady was appointed at the public house. The new landlady who took over decided that she was not happy to go ahead with the project. We were offered a field that the public house owned to site a portacabin in for the youth to use but found, when we went to the planning department, that it would be unlikely to obtain planning permission because it occasionally floods!

We have since been offered some alternative land but have been refused planning permission because of the access off Weston Road and the landowner has said that if he is not able to have that access then he will not let us have the land.  We are now looking at other sites within the village to see if we can find an alternative.

During this time my appetite to try and address the youth’s issues was aroused to such an extent that I became a parish councillor in order to be able to highlight their issues to the Parish Council and hopefully help to address some of them. This has proved to be fairly successful and the council is currently looking at land to install a play area for young teens, land for a youth shelter, land for affordable housing, and some recreational land for all ages to use. 

During the past few years I have met some very dedicated, hard working individuals whose ultimate goal is to improve life for teenagers and young people who previously would have had no champions to help them have a voice in their futures.  These people have not just concentrated on urban areas, where they can easily reach a large number in one hit, but have stretched themselves very thinly to reach out to small numbers in the rural areas. They have worked along people like me, who are keen amateurs, to assist us both financially and with expert knowledge to help us run a successful youthclub. This is expanding further with the advent of the youth project, if we can find some land.

We have had many hurdles to jump and no doubt have many more to come but with the dedicated people in the various organisations that we have had dealings with I hope that we will eventually succeed in making rural life more bearable for many young people who unfairly receive a lot of bad press. Networking has been the way in which I have become so deeply involved in the youth work. I have now become a member of the Targeted Youth Support (see section Targeted Youth Support Pathfinder) team that is focussing on Honeybourne and Pebworth but who we hope will produce a model that will work well for other rural communities and the young people who live in them. 

Written by Angie Herbert (June 2007),

Youth Club Secretary