It’s helped me decide what I want to do,
I want to work with kids, perhaps as a teaching assistant for children with special needs. I’m going to work towards this now.
Rawthorpe Junior Club (2014)
In a nutshell…
- A community association wanted to start a youth club, they had lots of ideas but no skills or experience.
- CUP helped them clarify their goal and find ways to reach it.
- Local kids benefitted from the club and the adult volunteers gained too.
Local people wanted to create more activities for children. As Alison from the community association explained,
“We had the enthusiasm, but we needed to know a lot, everything really: how to run activities, how to manage the kids, how to organise things, what was safe, what forms we needed and how to fill them in. We were starting from scratch.”
We sat in while the group of volunteers ran sessions for local children, this helped us to identify what support they needed.
Together we designed a programme to create good games for children and also to equip volunteers with core learning about session planning, managing risk, managing behaviour, clear roles and responsibilities, safeguarding etc. Volunteers committed 50 hours of their time to complete a Sports Leaders UK Level 2 Community Sports Leaders course.
Rawthorpe Junior Club started at the community centre, attracting new people into the building.
A valuable experience:
“It’s been great for us as an Association, as the host for the club we know so much more about our responsibilities now. The training, and the support from CUP, have shown us how volunteering should happen.” Alison, Community Association Officer.
“For me, I’ve learned a lot about what we need to do and why, and I’ve thought about how I come across to the children. I’m better at how I talk with them now – less shouty and more calm.” Ben, volunteer
What happened along the way?
Confidence grew – volunteers rated their confidence level at four out of ten before the training. That went up to eight when we asked again a few months after the course.
Special events – as well as a regular youth club the community association put on special events like a Hallowe’en party.
This project was a pilot for our Community Activators Project