Youth, November 2022

This summer Wendover Youth Centre ran Project Engage. The project was funded by The Wendover Community Board and aimed to involve young people aged between 11 and 16 years old living in Wendover and the surrounding villages, by providing interesting activities and opportunities throughout the summer.

The project consisted of two youth festivals and summer workshops in art, baking, gardening and music as well as football sessions. We partnered with a number of other organisations during this project to help deliver these workshops. A massive thank you to the following for their delivery of the workshops: Active in the Community for the football sessions, Youth Concern who provided their music studio, Lindengate for delivering a garden/conservation workshop and Sally O’Halloran who taught baking skills.

The youth festivals were a great success with over 100 young people attending each one at Castle Park. These festivals helped us to advertise the subsequent workshops we provided throughout the summer holidays. In total we ran 19 workshops for 119 young people aged between 11 and 16 years old. The workshops enabled young people to pursue their passions and spend time with friends as well as having something to do in the summer holidays.

After the project we had a significant increase in young people attending the youth activities at the Youth Centre. We currently interact with over 150 young people a week, with 90 of these attending our Friday night sessions. This is a huge increase from before the summer holidays.

We are planning to continue to work closely with the organisations we partnered with on Project Engage. We aim to provide further focused activities for those young people who wish to continue pursuing their passions.