MYPP Update - March 2009

MYPP Update - March 2009

Last Updated (Tuesday, 03 March 2009 17:00) Written by eric Thursday, 19 February 2009 13:48

Over ten years ago young people in the Malpas area asked for “somewhere to go and something to do”. This was the start of Malpas Young Persons Project. Along the way we created a Young Persons Council who helped to design our Centre (now next door to the Fire Station) and “hit the jack pot” with a National Lottery grant application which funded it.

Now, the Centre is over 5 years old. Its design has stood the test of time. The place has been looked after and not trashed as some pessimists had expected. In this last year we have had 114 young people attending sessions: Mondays after school for Year 6 upwards; Wednesday evenings for Year 9 and above; and Friday evenings for juniors aged 8 to 12.

Funding

Our funding comes from grants, subs, and rent from hiring out the Centre to other groups involved in providing services to young people. Thus the Centre is home to Health Service Clinics for Speech Therapy  (Tuesday mornings) and Sexual Health (Thursday lunchtimes). The newly integrated Children’s Services are using the Centre to meet parents in outreach sessions on Monday afternoons. A baby café is due to start in March on Wednesday mornings and a First Aid Course aimed at parents with young children will be starting at the end of February. Tattenhall Christian Fellowship visits on Sunday evenings once a month and, when demand for particular projects has arisen (e.g. guitar lessons), a private tutor has run sessions on Saturday mornings.

Volunteers

The Project is run entirely by volunteer members, ranging in age from late teens to over 70 who take turns in supervising the evening sessions. We count a member as anyone who wants to see young people grow successfully through their teenage years – this includes parents, grand parents and neighbours. Young people themselves are members in a different sense and our Young Persons Council is a means of giving them a representative voice in the community. We need a high number of volunteers to run the sessions smoothly and to avoid parents having to supervise their own children. The presence of adults in quantity also helps young people to see the local “community” as helpful and supportive, which in turn brings out their better sides

Issues we face

After five years, we need to take stock.  We seem to be very successful with our younger members (in excess of thirty) on Fridays. Our Wednesday membership is growing steadily. Monday attendance is quite small although we have our “regulars”.

A number of questions need to be faced. What proportion of the teenage population actually wants somewhere to go when there are sports clubs and other specialist groups in the area and homework has to be done sometime? Should we up our game and find a professional youth worker to help attract older teenagers?  Do we need to increase the range of activities /nights on offer, e.g. run a film club?   Do we make it a condition on families using the facility that they join the volunteer rota or otherwise help in running the facility?

Co-operation between villages?

The solution to these questions may well lie in co-operation, both in the village and beyond.  We have already supplied new members for the Sports Club football teams. Work currently being done in No Mans Heath may well offer chances of linking local initiatives through use of the Sports Hall - bringing challenges, competition and opportunities for burning off excess teenage energy. The chances of each village getting  a centre like Malpas are remote. A more sensible approach is to take stock of facilities and initiatives across the whole area  and ensure that we use what we have to capacity. We also need to keep an eye on the proportion of resources which should be allocated to the rural area by official bodies like Connexions, which now employs the County Council’s former youth workers.

Broxton Rural Youth Council

The new West Cheshire and Chester Council’s ward for this area is “Broxton”, which extends to Tattenhall and across to Farndon as well as taking in Malpas. People running Youth Projects from across this area have already met to explore the possibilities of co-operating to form a “cluster group” to raise more strategic issues with Childrens Services, Connexions etc. A spin off from this is the reformation of our Young Persons Council, which now meets in school time at Bishop Heber High School, every other Thursday, during the period allocated to Citizenship. This enables young people from anywhere in the Broxton Ward to take part without having to travel significant distances to meetings held outside school time. It is “staffed” by Ann Wright, our local councillor for Broxton, Ron Davies from Connexions and Eric Beak (MYPP)

Contact us

Five years on we are still here. True, we have to attend to changes around us, but our volunteers are all convinced that Malpas and the surrounding area  is the better for having the Centre. If you support the benefits the facility provides, please offer some time as a volunteer. Contact Sally on 01948 860 453 or Eric on 01948 860787.