By Ian Huddleston, Community Organiser
Following on from listenings with the young people at JADE, the information back was that they wanted more sports activities to do.
I arranged to meet with David Robinson who has run fitness and boxing sessions previously at a gym, to see if he would like to get involved and run some sessions at JADE with the young people. David is from Dinnington, and all his family are from the area. He talked about the area when he was a child and the community spirit that seems to have been lost, and how he would love to get involved in putting something back into the community.
We spoke about the possibility of setting up a community group and getting some ideas together to start running fitness/boxing group for the young people of the area. I gave David all the information for him to look into starting a constituted community group.
David also mentioned he would like to volunteer, and get involved with the community, so I arranged for him to attend the “introduction to community organising” course in June and has now signed up as a Rotherham Federation volunteer and has already started helping by doing listenings with myself at Dinnington carnival.
The project will benefit the local community as there is a big issue with ASB in Dinnington, so this will give a lot of the young people something to do. It will benefit the young people, improve fitness, give them focus, meet new friends, and bring old and young people together.
Sam Oldroyd from JADE was very keen on the idea and explained what JADE have been doing over the last few years. The idea would definitely fit in with their work and invited us back to the youth club to speak with Lisa – who is a youth worker at JADE – about setting this up. It was talked about potentially starting to run sessions at the youth club on a Tuesday evening (david has experience in working with Autism Spectrum Disorder & children with special educational needs), then see how it goes and if this is popular, or if some of their young people want to take it further, then other sessions could be run and would look at funding it, this has been now finalised and will start on 9th July.
We have also looked at the High Nook centre and will be putting sessions on there for all the family, tailored to the needs of the people wanting to go. This will also bring the centre back into use and connect residents to the TARA group, family fitness sessions will now start on the 16th July.