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.

A new heart for Brackenhall

Time for change: the current church and community centre

While the Chestnut Centre is impressive, there’s a need for a centre closer to the heart of Brackenhall. A second centre is now being built which will replace the existing Brackenhall church and community centre with a £2m, purpose built facility in a more central location on Holt Avenue.

Inside the new centre there will be a hall, café, church, meeting space, IT suite and changing rooms. Outside, there are plans for two football pitches and a multi-use games area.

The chair of the Brackenhall Community Trust, which is overseeing the development of the centre, is 79-year-old Joan Mallinson, who has been attending Brackenhall church since she was seven. ‘The current centre is full most days,’ she says. ‘There isn’t the space to develop it as we’d like.’

The current centre was built as a church in 1939. In the 1980s it was taken over by Kirklees Council to be run as a community centre, with the church retaining a small room to worship in. Joan is looking forward to the extra space the church will have in the new centre.

‘The church and the work we do there mean a lot to me,’ she says. ‘We’ve done a lot of work, particularly with young people. We’ve had a Boys’ Brigade since 1947 and it’s still running.’

Work on the Brackenhall Centre started in July and DBI is putting up 75 per cent of the funding. Joan was full of praise for the organisation. ‘Without their input it would never have got built,’ she says.

But she isn’t relying on DBI to make the project succeed, or on Fresh Horizons, which will manage the new centre. ‘It belongs to the community and it’s up to us as the community to see that it works,’ she says.

The local effect: Darren’s story

When Fresh Horizons managing director Mike McCusker first drove into Brackenhall, he thought: ‘Bloody hell, it’s all boarded up.’

At the time much of the estate was about to be demolished. Since then, he has witnessed a ‘radical transformation’ of the area. The transformation might be most obvious in the buildings and environment, but for Mike there has also been a dramatic change in opportunities for local people.

It wasn’t just the negative things that struck him. The other thing that leapt out was the strong sense of community. ‘You’re driving down the road, there’s a car in front of you, all of a sudden he sees someone he knows driving the other way, so they stop, wind down the windows and have a chat,’ he said. ‘There is constant beeping as people see people they know even if they’ve seen each other 20 times that day.’

The community was far more close-knit than any Mike had experienced previously and it strengthened his determination that Fresh Horizons should make a genuine difference in people’s lives. ‘This isn’t playing around, this is local people,’ he said. ‘If we can get local people to identify local issues and address them, then that’s something really powerful.’

A friendly space: the Chestnut Centre library

As described in this post, Fresh Horizons has gone from employing two people in 2002 to a staff of almost 70. Nearly all these employees live locally: 85 per cent of them even live and work in the same postcode.

The result is that people in Deighton and Brackenhall are getting the opportunity not just to work, but also to develop and move on in their jobs. A case in point is Darren Thomas, whose career at the Fresh Horizons base in the Chestnut Centre parallels an important change in attitude among council employees from outside the area.

Darren is now the senior customer information adviser at the Chestnut Centre and manages all the front of house staff. However, he started out as what Mike calls ‘basically a bouncer’.

He was taken on when Kirklees Council’s neighbourhood housing office moved into the centre. ‘They’d come from a fortress and wanted to try to replicate that fortress but that didn’t fit with the ethos of the building,’ says Mike.

‘So we said no, you can’t have bulletproof screens, no you can’t have wire cages, you’re just going to work out of an office because no-one will shame themselves in front of kids and neighbours, you’ll have a different experience here.

‘However Unison argued that they wanted some security so we had poor old Darren, bored out of his brain waiting for nothing to happen, until it clocked with them that this was an expense they didn’t need, and Darren moved to be a customer information adviser, went through all the training, then took on a deputy role.

‘So you have a local person, in a relatively short time, moving into a management role and on the management team of Fresh Horizons. And everyone knows who Darren is, knows his background and where he’s come from, and I think that sends a powerful message to local people.’

And as Darren points out, the effects extend beyond the walls of the Chestnut Centre. ‘When I was younger places like this wouldn’t have existed because they would have got broken into and vandalised,’ he says. ‘When I was younger strangers wouldn’t be able to walk up and down. It’s a lot safer than it was when I was growing up.’

Fresh Horizons - a case of local empathy

Men in black: Fresh Horizons makes a point of employing locals

Allowing local social enterprise Fresh Horizons to run the Chestnut Centre has been a crucial factor in changing Deighton and Brackenhall for the better.

Not everybody was happy with the idea in the early days. There was an assumption that public services would and should be delivered directly by Kirklees Council.

DBI chief officer Andi Briggs remembers the challenge of changing people’s opinions. ‘At the time it was very difficult to get the wider political approval because it was seen as a big risk,’ he says. ‘There were also some issues with unions and others – it was seen as the slippery slope to undermining public sector jobs.’

The fact that European money was being used to fund the centre’s construction gave DBI some leverage and when it opened in 2005 Fresh Horizons took on the management of the facility. Fresh Horizons has a wide remit but its key role is to provide sustainable employment, mainly through contracts to deliver public services. It achieves this by working in partnership with Kirklees Council and other voluntary and private sector organisations.

Andi Briggs believes this commitment to giving responsibility to local people is crucial to the long term success of a regeneration initiative. ‘There has to be real engagement and investment in local people,’ he says. ‘You have to give them real, proper assets and buildings to manage that are of significant value and status so they’re not the fringe things – they are real empowerment.

‘At the same time you have to support them in such a way that they stand or fall independently of us. In that sense they are not part of the programme directly because otherwise the risk is they go when the programme ends.’

When it was launched in 2002, Fresh Horizons had just two employees. The credibility it has gained through successfully running the Chestnut Centre has enabled it to expand to the point where it employs almost 70 local people and last year had a turnover of £1.3m.

One of Fresh Horizons’ first ventures, which still continues today, was to recruit and train local people to deliver research projects for the public sector. The approach has been cited by Ofsted as an example of best practice in using adult education to boost community renewal.

Fresh Horizons also runs a building maintenance company, covering all aspects of the building trade, from repairs to refurbishment, and is recognised by industry accreditation bodies to help experienced workers gain recognised qualifications in their trades.

It has won Ministry of Justice funding for a project to reduce the number of burglaries against vulnerable people, and is working with the police, Kirklees Council and Victim Support to fit security equipment to 1,000 houses and flats across the area each year.

In recent years Fresh Horizons has extended its work to focus on empty private properties, seeking to bring clusters of empty homes back into use to prevent areas falling into decline and turning problem properties into opportunities for housing, employment and training.

As Fresh Horizons managing director Mike McCusker says, though, this is more than just a series of projects.

‘If you take the library and information centre that’s a contracted service from the local authority. But if you look at the way we deliver it, it’s local people delivering a service to other local people. It’s about the empathy you get.’