Young people have always been a top priority for the community. Finding ways for them to be heard and influence what goes on has never been easy but when imaginative ideas are tried the results can be insightful and inspiring.
This page highlights two recent opportunities for young people to express themselves. We think the results are insightful and inspiring and hopefully time will prove them to be influential as well.
The Burngreave After School Study Support Project have recently run a writing competition and here we bring you extracts from the winning entries. The project aims to raise the achievement of Yemeni pupils and if funded by Burngreave New Deal for Communities through the Yemeni Community Association.
Creating a community vision
By Mohammed Kaid, 15 years
As I look from my bedroom window all I can see is joy riders, deals, drugs and many more. I have seen cars crashing into each other making sounds like Bang! Crash! and Ring Ring! But as the years have gone by the council has begun to build speed bumps, consequently there are fewer crashes.
Also, of the things that I can see now have improved, especially in the last 3–4 years is less violence and that is a good thing. In future, this place will continue to improve because kids, children and even adults can go out and smell the fresh air.
My family is part of this community and they think that violence existed at the start, but as the years went past they all started to get out. The neighbours were scared at the start, but now they are all right. They’ve started to get to know us and to get together with us, now we visit each other at any time of day.
What I would like to see in the future is to have more facilities, for younger children and even adults, football, tennis, cricket etc. There should be more clubs for younger children so they can organise trips.
My Community Pitsmoor
By Hussain Husain, 15 years
As I walk around my community I can’t help to stop and think about the state it is in. The streets covered with litter like a junk yard. The houses are old looking and are about to collapse. The roads cracked up giving cars a bumpy ride.
What you hear in my community are horrifying sounds of gunshots, sometimes even the shouting of people in trouble. The joy riders riding fast and furiously up and down the streets, contributing to civilian fear to go out of their houses. I would rather listen to the sound of the wind blowing and the birds singing. The sound of children playing, not breaking the law.
The vision that is witnessed by the children just encourages them to forget about their education and attempt an illegal struggle to become the gangster of the block. The drug dealing creates an idea that the only way to make money is to go out and sell drugs.
Some adults are also creating a negative scene by not getting into work and smoking on the streets next to the children and showing them the wrong path through life. They should be out there working, not showing children bad acts, they are at the stage where they start to make life decisions and that is interfered by what they see the older ones do.
Ways the government could make my community a better place is by making sure children are attending school; build youth clubs to give children something to put them off criminal acts; the big drug dealers to be stopped so the teenagers don’t get that easy choice. Finally police it a bit more to make the criminals be more fearful.