Youth Centre

In 2008 directors sat down to write a five year business plan for FYC. Three years later, by the grace of God, with a lot of hard work and support from our supporting churches, what was planned for five years has been achieved in three. 

We wanted to reach 180 young people from the community. We have 200 registered users.

We wanted to start a Youth Forum. We have one numbering 17, that meets weekly to plan and implement a range of activities for its members.

We wanted to hire staff dedicated to the aims and objectives of the charity, we have 3 part time able staff.

We wanted to reach the disengaged, disaffected young people hanging around our public spaces. We are well into our second year of delivering that service.

We wanted to work with other service providers to deliver our targets. Among those we partner with, we work with the Safer Neighbourhood Team and recently were charged with working with the Youth Offending Team to provide for a young person who would have had a custodial sentence without Engaging Furzedown’s intervention.

But most of all we were compelled to be a Christian presence to young people of Furzedown. Everything we do, all of our strategy is underpinned with an acknowledgement of the need to share the gospel in word where appropriate and in actions.

There are so many stories of how the staff and volunteers do that. FYC has become a safe place, a shelter when things are going wrong, a place to explore new possibilities and a place to have fun.

During the summer exhibition at Sprout, Furzedown’s local gallery, several people who read the history of FYC asked why the churches were doing this. The answer is, because we have a mandate to be salt and light, to establish a place where young people feel loved, cared for, challenged and motivated to explore who they are in this very uncertain world we live in.

The centre is at capacity in junior club and senior club has a regular group of participants. The numbers of volunteers who work alongside staff have grown and FYC is at the very beginning of being able to offer more formal training and mentoring of these volunteers.  Focus Groups in Self Defence and Transition from Y6 to Y7 were well received this year though low numbers due to other after school activities meant some could not come and others to come erratically. We are currently talking to the Tooting Hub of Extended Schools and Graveney School to better coordinate activities so that young people can take full advantage of what’s on offer. Next year we will be repeating the Transition Group and are working on plans for what the other groups will focus on, in line with the borough’s youth services agenda of priorities for young people.

Engaging Furzedown is on the streets 3 nights a week with at least one of those evenings offering some activities in the youth centre. Last year EF worked with a group of 20 or so young people, building relationships with the aim of getting them to commit to a mentoring programme designed to guide them back into education, apprenticeships or jobs. Unfortunately, during the summer, ¾ of them were picked up by police and sent to prison for a short time. Others were ordered out of the ward and in effect, lost to the EF team.

However, some are still around and their numbers have been added to so that EF is seeing about 15 mostly new and younger people who are at serious risk of making some poor choices that could affect their lives for the long term.

A small girls group is starting to look at options for moving on and out of the life style they have chosen. Some of the others are beginning to or at least becoming aware of the need to take responsibility for their own choices and some who have done so, have with EF’s help, avoided custodial sentences. 

But the more we engage with all the young people in the community, the more we see there is to do. The key in our strategy for the future is to prevent young people to get to the point where they feel unloved, unlovable and hopeless, to rescue those who already feel that way and are already acting out their feelings, to prevent others from joining in with this ‘street’ behaviour.

We mustn’t fool ourselves into thinking that all needy young people come from dysfunctional families or live in Children’s Homes, though some do. All the young people in this community will know the language on the street for sexual acts. This is offence language that is violent, aggressive and demeaning, that violates every ounce of what God intended humans to think about themselves and others.

I would go so far as to say all of our children know where to get drugs and alcohol. All buy into the belief that they need to look and act a certain way in order to be acceptable. All are under pressure to do well academically at school and yet live under the cloud of no jobs available for them when they finish, school, college, university. Many know or know of someone who is their age and is pregnant or had an abortion.

What I’m saying is that all our young people are at risk in a sense and all need help. There is that old saying, ‘it takes a community to raise a child'. We are fortunate that in this community our three churches have established Furzedown Youth Centre to help meet some of these needs. The challenge is for our churches to continue to meet these needs and not only meet the needs of now, but those that are being uncovered as we scratch below the surface, uncovering more profound, more disturbing needs than the ones in our original mandate which was to provide a place for young people to go to have fun.  That is of course, part of the rescue plan but we need right now to dig deeper into our pockets, roll up our sleeves and tackle the issues of finance and volunteers to meet what we already know of as urgent needs for those we are in touch with.

In a moment we will look at our finances. God has blessed this work amazingly. But for what we need to do right now, we need £1,600 for our centre based work and £2,500 for EF. We need more volunteers for the jobs in the job descriptions on the table in the other room.  We need people to commit to pray regularly for the work. Please will you take this message back to your PCC’s, leadership teams and your friends in this community?

Carol Burt
Chair FYC