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In this issue of bigtimes Wales
If you go down to the woods today: A grant of £300,000 from BIG’s Reaching Out programme paid for Tir Coed to set up the Woodland Initiatives as a Catalyst for Kids’ Education and Development project – WICKED for short.
WICKED runs woodland initiatives for disadvantaged, “hard to reach” and disengaged young people from the four rural counties of Ceredigion, Carmarthenshire, Pembrokeshire and Powys.
Skating to a brighter future: “I was a terror and I got in with the wrong crowd,” says Adam. “The police were round my house once a week and I was getting into trouble in school because of my low attendance record. I was even thrown out of school for a month for making one of the teachers cry.
“After school, we used to drink booze, smoke and cause havoc in the village. I was given an ASBO and I was banned from the street for three years. I used to set matchboxes alight and chuck them on people’s doorsteps and we used to mess around on the roofs of houses and garages.
Pop in to Prestatyn!: You know you’re somewhere different as soon as you walk through the doors. The walls are covered in bright, eyecatching designs, the decor is vibrant, airy and fun. There’s a pool table, a games console, a flat screen television and computer workstations; and this morning, despite being a ‘youth project’, the Pop-In Centre is packed with groups of Prestatyn’s senior citizens for their regular coffee morning.
This isn’t a ‘youth project’ that the rest of the town steers clear of. It’s the kind of place where colourful murals, painted by the young people that use the centre, form the backdrop for a group of older people catching up with friends and having a chat. There’s surely nowhere else on a high street that’s quite like this and certainly the cafe worker there, Gray Hawley, thinks that the Pop-In Centre is a pretty special place.
VALI added: “And yet, here they are, offering teas and coffees, shooting pool and indulging in some friendly banter with Tom, one of the youth workers, while they wait to chat about their experiences at VALI.
VALI stands for Voluntary Alternative Learning Initiative, and as Tom points out “The voluntary is a really big word for us here”.
The project received £230,527 from the Big Lottery Fund’s Reaching Out programme. VALI is a project that gives young people with difficult educational backgrounds or a history of contact with the Youth Offending Team an opportunity to take up a place on a project where they could be doing anything from kayaking, to mountain climbing or food hygiene to first aid. In their own words this project is all about choice, “they don’t MAKE us do anything. It’s all up to us,” says Danielle aged 14, the youngest of the three young people we meet.
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