This is a story of a 17 year old girl’s life that has been effected by drugs. To read her story please click on the following link.
Our Youth Support Workers have been working extremely hard in all the areas throughout the Brownlow area and have successfully completed their Reconnaissance reports for 2011. Here is a link to Alicia Harney and Nadine Quigleys report.
Over the past number of years Drumgor Detached Youth Work Project has noticed that in some areas throughout Brownlow there tends to be some rioting (recreational) carried out by the young people. The cost of these activities mounted to hundreds of thousands of pounds and many statutory and non statutory bodies endeavoured to find a solution but with little success. The staff from Drumgor Detached Youth Work Project decided it was time to talk to the young people involved in this recreational rioting and see why they get involved in this and also see if we could work with them and get them involved in a diversion programme. The programme had to be innovative and ‘new’ so we decided to try and get into their mindset by taking away all outside influences such as media, TV, social networks and electric. The programme tests the young people’s skills and focus’ on their skills strengths.
One of the activities involved a peace stick and the young people had to speak about their community and what they thought residents thought of them and some of the responses from the young people were “They think we are scumbags” and “We ruin the area”. The young people said we live up to what they want us to be “if they think it we do it”.
From this activity staff from Drumgor Detached Youth Work Project knows what issues these young people have and can then work with them and design suitable programmes that will meet their needs.
From the young people being away on this programme there was no trouble at all in the Brownlow area and it saved the area from forking out thousands of pounds in cleaning up the area. The young people really enjoyed this programme and the effects are already being felt by community groups and representatives.
More case studies to follow
