Nacro
Nacro, the national crime reduction charity delivers a series of youth crime prevention programmes in Wakefield. At present we are running a Junior YIP (8-13 year olds) and a senior YIP (14-17 year olds) on the Eastmoor and Lupset estates. These projects offer up to 5 hours per week of positive activities for young people including cooking, sports, arts, film making and a variety of workshops.
Some of the projects we run are…….
• A Positive Futures programme which links drugs and substance
awareness work with sports. Young people have participated in a wide range
of sports from rugby, football, swimming, golf, basketball to badminton
and table tennis.
• The Bikeshed is a lively space where children and young people
rebuilt bikes and learn bike maintenance skills.
• Some young people are involved in the mentoring scheme which means
they are matched with a trained volunteer who meets with them on a regular
one to one basis. We also have a team of volunteers who are involved in
all the group activities.
In winter 2006 we ran a Global Youth Work project with a group of young people aged 10 to 13 in Ferrybridge, Knottingley. The project had been designed to focus on cooking as this was an interest of the group and something that all of them got excited about doing. We had difficulty accessing cooking facilities so we focused instead on food and the ways we are connected to other parts of the world through the food we buy and eat. We also looked at the other ways in which we are connected to the world – through education, music, fashion – and used drawing and banner-making to express what we felt about those issues. We finished the project at the end of December with a little Christmas party in which we explored where the traditions of Christmas come from and thought about what people in other parts of the world do at this time of year.
The youth workers involved in running the project wondered if some of
the other young people involved with Nacro in Wakefield might be interested
in running a Global Youth Action Project and spring 2007 finds the senior
group starting another cooking focused project with a global theme. To
find out how they get on watch this space……..