And so what kind of changes would you like to see in the future of Bray Youthreach?
So what is your favourite thing about working in Youthreach?
No two days are the same. And I think that is probably my favourite thing. Like I said, some of those days can be absolutely amazingly wonderful and some of them can be really tough and very challenging but it makes for a very interesting job. My other favourite thing in Youthreach has to be the relationships that I develop with students, like yourself Megan. Even though I don’t get to talk to students every moment of every day, I always tell them that when they need to come and talk to me they can. And that’s actually really important for all of us and all of the staff team in the centre; we base our whole job around positive relationships with our students because we know that that’s what gives them the opportunity to develop and grow both personally and in their education, and to make sure that they are going to leave here the absolute best version of themselves that they can be.
I am going to start by saying that there are a couple of things that I would never change and that is the fact that we are like a big family, looking after one another and caring for each other. The biggest change I would love to see for our centre is to be able to have a physical environment that is a bit more appropriate. Whilst we are in a beautiful, old building here in Bray, there are a lot of our rooms that are quite small and it would be fantastic to have more scope to develop our programme.
It’s like I said earlier; one of the things I love about Youthreach is that no two days are ever the same, and I also feel that no two years should ever be the same. If we are really going to be based on meeting the needs of our students then we should always be looking to change and grow with them. There are going to be certain things that we will always keep because they are really important but we have to figure out, each year, what our students need and what we have to change to meet those needs. So that’s it, I guess it’s just about never standing still.
I would also hope that things will change over the next couple of years to allow us to provide even more supports to our students. I’m really talking about the national picture here for Youthreach. Things are changing all the time. We have students coming to us with greater needs now; whether it’s to do with their education or it’s to do with their personal development, and that requires more and more support. We want to be able to provide that to the absolute best of our ability and that in turn requires support from a government perspective. I know there are some changes that our students would like to see. There are other courses that we would like to offer. For example we have loads of very talented artists here at the moment and we don’t really have an art programme, so we want to introduce that in the near future.