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Tuesday 27 September 2011

Sport and more: working with young people


Throughout the history of DBI local people have been concerned to provide activities for young people in the area and help them feel proud of where they live.

Sport has always been at the heart of the community -
but today's young people need more than football
Many of those activities have revolved around sports. Almost as soon as the renewal programme was underway, local residents came together to form Deighton Sports Council.

Its first objective was to support a bid to the Sport England lottery panel for money to build a new sports centre. The bid was accepted in 2000 and in November 2001 the Deighton Community Sports Arena opened to the public.

A second successful bid to the Sports Lottery funded two development workers for the arena, who set up the Deighton Into Sport Project (DISP), building links with local schools and starting clubs for football, athletics and basketball. Over the last four years DBI has ploughed around £95,000 from the community dividend into DISP’s activities.

DISP can claim to have had a profound effect on the lives of many young people from a wide range of social and ethnic backgrounds. It is particularly proud of the fact that several children who became involved with the junior football club at the age of five were still active in sport as young men. Some have gone on to train as coaches and have found jobs in local schools.

But not everybody enjoys sport or feels able to participate. This is a particular concern for Daneeka Simpson, who runs the Youth on the Hill project, based at the Chestnut Centre.

‘A lot of what’s available is sports related. There’s nothing for young girls to do and if you don’t like sports there’s nothing to get involved in, which is why we’re trying to switch - we’re doing some gardening stuff with kids and going out and playing some activities in their community rather than them feeling they need to be really good at football or really good at basketball.’

Youth on the Hill works with groups who are often seen as hard to engage, particularly those who are not involved in education, employment or training.

It runs a volunteering scheme which helps young people to identify with the community around them. Volunteers are asked to commit to a certain number of hours and offered opportunities such as working in the community café, planning Deighton Carnival, caring for elderly people and mentoring young people. There are also opportunities to undertake practical DIY work with Fresh Horizons projects such as the empty property and home security schemes.

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