One highlight has been seeing our High Street premises getting utilised by several groups, providing a fantastic space for young people from different areas to be able to meet indoors over the Autumn and Winter months. Groups including Kinnoull, Craigie/Moncreiffe, Congregational Church, Tulloch, and Prince’s Trust have all used the space. It has been developed into an attractive location to deliver youthwork, with a basketball arcade game, top quality pool table, various game consoles, and plenty of sofas for sitting and relaxing.
Having this space has allowed us to start our own city centre drop ins as well, aimed at those young people who would often be out in town drinking on Friday and Saturday nights.
The organisation has had staffing changes and improvements. We have taken on a new trainee youth worker and a new sessional staff member, who are providing great value to the organisation, planning and running youth groups, as well as helping around the office. Both of these young people have come through the YMCA as young people and volunteers before entering employment with us. Our office manager left her role to pursue a new opportunity elsewhere, so her jobs have been divided between staff members. This has meant several staff members have new aspects to their jobs, but things are running smoothly. We have taken on a new staff member for approximately two days a week in partnership with Breathe in Aberfeldy who has been a key person in our city centre drop-ins.
The team has experienced working from home, with some members on furlough.
Some groups have had great success in lockdown, including creative writing and our new Minecraft sessions. Work got underway with Letham 4 All, premises were provided to Tulloch Net. Riverside Church are being supported to open up a youth cafe. Meetings were also held with Bertha Park.
One of the highlights has been the launch of ‘International Connections’ which is a discussion group that welcomes an international guest each week to tell their story. This has seen good engagement and really helped expand the viewpoints of the young people who come along.
A big highlight has been around the detached work. The engagement from young people has been really positive, and we have started to build relationships with one group at Quarrymill and one at the skatepark. We are now looking towards a potential skating festival in August to engage these young people further. It is worth noting that there are 20-30 year olds using the skatepark too.
One session, over lunch time in and around Perth High School was also very positive, getting to know the young people and gathering opinions about what we can provide for them in the future in the Western Edge area and also in the city centre.
Youth Voice, a youth representative group has worked on raising the voice of young people, acting as ambassadors and sharing views with the MSYP and Young Scot. They are also making suggestions for the construction and design of the new YCentre which is underway in Perth City.
One staff member has started the process of launching our new mental health mentoring service aimed at girls aged 9-14,’Y Girls Mentoring’. This has had an amazing amount of interest from potential mentors and training is now available, so everyone is best equipped to work with the young people who will be supported. We are the only organisation in Scotland that was successful through the Tampon Tax Fund. They surveyed 80 young people to gather their views on the lockdown.
It has now been 2 years since the UYW partnership started, over that time we have gradually taken more of a lead with representing the partnership as well as successfully securing three funding bids on behalf of the partnership.
After successfully securing funding for all partners through the Cashback funding it gave us the confidence to expand this approach to 11 organisations to now apply to the Youth Work Education Recovery Fund. Without the springboard from the universal partnership we wouldn’t have done this.
YMCA's HIGH STREET HIGHS AND LEADING IN PARTNERSHIP FUNDING