Chapeltown Young Peoples Club

The Chapeltown Young People’s 10-2 Club(CYP10-2C); the 10-2 Club was established in 1992, and is currently managing partner of the popular youth enquiry service; YesCyberCafé and, it’s subsidiary programmes including a weekday AfterSchool for pupils aged 13-16, and PROJECT7 a social-recreational Friday evening club for young people aged 13-19. The Club employs 4.7fte staff across its various projects assisted by 15 volunteers

The 10-2 Club was established in 1992 at the height of tensions between young people on the streets of Chapeltown and between young people and local police. A serious spate of night muggings of pensioners at local post offices and on streets across the City was directly attributed to the explosion of arcade games in the late 80s with established evidence that much of this ‘mugged’ money was in small coinage used to fuel non-gambling arcade games such as the then popular Space Invaders.

The Club was established by a group of 12 young local self-builders who by day built their 12-houses but after work had no where to go in the evenings for recreation and socialising other than local drinking clubs. Indeed, the few local social and recreational facilities in the area were fast becoming derelict with glass strewn over old basketball courts, the small adventure playground overgrown and closed to local children, internal politics at the Mandela Centre closing off the facility to large sections of young people who did not fit, and with the effective usage of unlit local parks limited to summer day time use only.

The group, led by self-build coordinator Claude ‘Hopper’ Hendrickson persuaded Leeds City Council to open the old Chapeltown Community Centre on 2 evenings a week under the group’s supervision, and to install a number of free arcade machines for young people aged 16+. Against much local and institutional opposition, the group were also able to persuade the Council that the optimum opening hours for the evening programme was between 10pm and 2am when underemployed young people were most likely to be alert and outdoors. The popular Wednesday and Friday night programme became known as the Chapeltown Young People’s Club, entertaining young people with music, table and arcade games, a tuck shop and videoing and projection equipment.

Throughout the late 80s and early 90s positioned and informed community activists developed information on national statistics, local authority and voluntary sector research, OFSTED reports and private and commissioned case studies that in turn led to the dissemination across peer forums and networks a clearer picture of the status of young African Caribbeans across the country. For instance, in the case of Chapeltown, the 1991 National Census stated that the area known as Chapeltown in Leeds had the ‘densest population of African Caribbeans anywhere in Europe’.

These several sources showed that Chapeltown’s young people had been consistently educationally and socially disadvantaged and were left with poor education and aspirations compounded by a lack of real opportunity in the City of Leeds. This led to a well documented generation of disaffected, detached and marginalised young people unlikely to access mainstream provisioning and more than likely to slip into a spiral of petty and more serious crime.

In 1993, with the assistance of local development worker; Paul Auber from the local Palace Youth Project, the Club was able to attract funding for a part-time development worker from the West Yorkshire Racial Justice Programme of the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, with a brief to develop access to opportunities for the 135 registered and attending Club members. This led to the employment of part-time youth work staff at the Club and the capacity to begin to signpost and engage young people in community and mainstream opportunities including volunteering, training, education and employment.

In 1997 the Chapeltown Community Centre was declared unsafe, boarded up and listed for demolition by the Local Authority, and consequently the Club was forced to vacate the premises and close its evening programme. Anticipating these circumstances, the Club management had proposed a daytime facility to provide a youth enquiry service(YES) with referral-support for its growing client group. In 1999 the Club successfully negotiated a partnership with local Thomas Danby College for the YesCyberCafé project, and in partnership with UNITY Housing Association secured purpose-built premises consisting of an open plan shop-front reception, café area and public cyber suite, and a separate 12-place IT-suite for in-house classes, interview room and a manager’s office.
 

Since 1999 YesCyberCafé has consistently produced the highest voluntary sector youth work outcomes in the Chapel Allerton Ward, seeing over 4,000 young people from BME and other backgrounds in the area and from other parts of the City, and enjoying long-term support from Thomas Danby College, Leeds City Council, the National Youth Agency and Connexions and supported with European regenerative funding. The Club has been able to develop small satellite YesCyber suites in 3 other local youth centres in the Chapeltown area and has received requests to develop the concept in other areas of the City.

In the intervening years the Club itself has developed a large office base away from YesCyberCafé from where it has successfully designed and run a number of funded projects for young people, including the 1st TEE training-to-employment project in partnership with Leeds College of Building, in association with the Youth Offending Team(YOTS); the development of prison-mentor programme for young people about to leave prison  and their families, and a volunteering programme involving over 50 young people.

In addition the Club runs regular learning residentials away from the City and has organised youth exchanges to Norway, Austria, Sweden, Portugal, the Gambia and Jamaica.

Since 2002, on weekdays from 5-7.30pm the Club has managed an AfterSchool Club at YesCyberCafé for pupils aged 12-16, and have recently entered into a working management-partnership with the Chapeltown Independent AfterSchool(CIAS) who provide supplementary schooling on Saturdays for young people aged 5 -12 years old.

More recently the Club has facilitated the establishment of PROJECT7, a 7-11pm Friday evening social-recreational programme for young people based at the local authority run Mandela Centre. PROJECT7 has over 150 registered members aged 13-19 and performs a similar role to the earlier 10-2 Club prototype, however it differs in that it is peer led, managed and staffed, running activities and projects, in addition to its Friday night programme, that are more relevant to today’s young people.

PROJECT7 also provides the Club and other organisations with an important means of consulting with young people around their issues and needs.

Volunteering continues to be an area for development via YesCyberCafé, and is a proven way of teaching young people to be active citizens in their communities. Volunteering programmes continue although funding has not been made available for this work.

The following list provides an overview of the Club’s work over the last 6 years: