Youth Club

Time: Wednesday 5:30 to 7:30, Thursday 6:00 to 8:00
Cost: 50p per session (waiting list)

The Centre has a new youth club! It is aimed at a younger age group than the old one – Horden Young Citizens Project (HYCP) is exclusively for school years 2 to 8 and runs on Wednesday and Thursday evenings. The sessions cost 50p and are run by qualified youth workers from Creative Youth Opportunities. When funding permits, we also run extra sessions at weekends and during school holidays, with activities chosen by the young people themselves.

At the moment, regular activities include art and crafts, computer games and board games – a lot of the children have never played Monopoly before, but it’s proved very popular already! There are also regular discussion sessions around issues that affect the young people, such as bullying.

One of the aims of HYCP is to work with local community organisations to promote an active involvement in improving the community and environment. This could include clean-ups and litter picking; environmental improvements; and intergenerational work such as making hanging baskets for local residents.

At Christmas 2015, just a month after HYCP started, the young people baked and delivered biscuits to residents at the local Jack Dormand care home. This followed on from an incident where an elderly man was knocked over outside the Centre and one of the youth workers dealt with the incident: the young people immediately asked what they could do to help and foster relationships with residents. This is the kind of citizenship the group is intended to cultivate – particularly any which is initiated by the members themselves. 

In the future, we expect the workers and young people to start creating their own fundraising activities so the project becomes self-sustaining. This will be part of the “Young Citizen” portion, giving the young people the chance to interact in a positive way with other adults and groups. The ultimate aim – apart from letting everyone have fun! – is to make HYCP the basis for a “Youth Voice” for Horden, representing the young people of the community on a much wider scale.

We would like to thank the Durham Police and Crime Commissioner Community Safety Fund for the major grant that has allowed us to create the Young Citizens Project, and Creative Youth Opportunities for sending us such lovely workers.

In the words of one of our regular young members, it is already “The best. Youth. Club. Ever!!!”