Save our Youth Services
In recent years it has been made clear that many of the youth services offered to young people all over the UK have had to face major financial cuts leaving thousands of young people with nowhere to turn. An estimated £387m is believed to have been cut from youth services and it doesn’t look like things are getting any better. Another study found that 603 youth clubs were shut down between the years of 2012 and 2016.
This is not something we should take lightly, youth services play an enormous role in young peoples lives. Especially when we begin to hit slightly more deprived areas we start to see a higher demand for help on issues such as mental health and behavior problems. These are issues that youth work is notorious for having positive impacts on but why is this the case and is there anything that we as an organisation and you at home can do to help.
Youth services offer a safe place for young people to express themselves and learn things like social skills and confidence. It’s a non-formal way of education and for many young people this might be the only place they feel like they can have fun and achieve their goals.
We as youth workers have the means to prevent these problems in the first place so we should be given the chance to improve the lives of the thousands of young people who desperately need our help! If we do nothing about this the only possible outcome is that we end up with thousands of young people falling into the criminal justice system or dropping out of school because they were given nowhere to turn when they felt like their world was tumbling down at their feet.
Achieve More started out as nothing more than a small organisation just trying to make any impact on today’s youth, just a few short years later we have grew tremendously and we are now recognized as an organisation that engages and empowers children all over Glasgow through the many free dance and football session we run in over 30 sites we also implement multi sports and games in around 27 schools. Being a part of achieve more as a young person and experiencing the impact it had first hand has opened my eyes to the importance of youth work and the vital role it can play in a young persons life.
There are many things that Achieve More Scotland can do to help tackle these issues by bringing young people together and writing to their local MP why they think that youth services are Important. They can also share their story with other young people and start an online conversation addressing the issue. They can even contact the local press and get their voices heard. Its as simple as that and you at home can do it on your own or as part of a team with friends.
“We can not always build a future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future”
Franklin Roosevelt