By Elle Hartle, Digital Marketing Apprentice.
Over the summer break lots has been going on across the city in all the organisations which make up the Brighton & Hove Youth Collective. This included a summer programme run by The Trust for Developing Communities. This program gave young people the opportunity to choose any activity that they wished to do from a list of available activities.
Some of these included residential trips including camping, and day trips which included a trip to Thorpe Park and a Quad Biking trip. These activities and residential trips really allowed the young people to socialise and make friends throughout the summer. The summer program has proven very successful with keeping the young people entertained and keeping them busy as well as giving them something to do. The pictures here show the horse riding and go-karting day trips and mug painting at the youth cafe.
As well as these activities we also had a Youth Café at the Whitehawk Inn on Wednesday afternoons 3 till 5. Here there were youth workers to offer snacks, make smoothies and to be creative with some doodling and board games.
Throughout the summer weeks we met lots of young people attending some of the many activities and residential that were on offer. We are hoping that some of these new young people will come along to some of our youth groups in the future including the Young Women’s group and Thursday’s Youth Club at the 67 Centre.
As well as having these activities for the young people to enjoy, we at TDC also think that there are lots of other positives and benefits that will help to improve a young person’s confidence as they learn and develop new skills whilst on the summer program. This as a result will, we hope, benefit them in the future with school, college and potential jobs.
From our observations throughout the summer program, the behaviour of the young people proved amazing and as a result it also made the activities, residential trips and day trips really fun and enjoyable for everyone that was involved including local youth workers.
We have had lots of positive feedback from a number of young people and parents and carers including: “Thank you so much for a great day out with my friends!!!!!!! I have really enjoyed it today! I’m so very grateful”. Plus some feedback from parents and carers “(my sons) had a lovely day. Thank You”.
Plans are already underway for next year’s summer program but for now we are back to having our weekly youth sessions and events taking place throughout the year. We are hoping to get as many young people and parents or carers involved with what will be going on.
For more information on times and dates of our regular youth clubs please contact our community workers with young people Claire [email protected] and Caroline [email protected]
