Now’s the time to believe in our young people

Who can believe it’s been a year since the disturbances of last summer shook our city?

It seems like an age since Wolverhampton was rife with false rumour about what was and wasn’t happening. Tensions were high after watching reports of the devastation in other cities.

I remember driving around the ring road on 9th August at about 5.30pm and it was completely dead; the rumours had frightened everyone away. Of course, that day, we did experience some disturbances.

Fortunately for us, they were not as bad as London, Birmingham or Manchester, in part because of our police and citizens. But what’s changed since then?

Well, certainly the economy is still a very difficult place if you are young and out of work. Our own Learning Employment Achievement Programme (LEAP) which launched this year aims to tackle that very issue.

LEAP will give young, unemployed people an opportunity to discover their strengths and harness their talents.

Supporting unemployed young people, many who may have grown up in households where no one has ever worked, to get into training and ultimately employment is one of our key priorities.

We’re also developing new business streams which will make it easier for them to contribute to the estate where they live and further their sense of pride in their communities.

Giving young people the opportunity to get involved with what’s going on in their area, listening to and respecting their opinion and yes, I know it sounds cheesy, but believing in them can make a difference.

I’ve been inspired by watching some of the videos of our young tenant ambassadors on our YouTube channel; articulate, passionate and natural-born communicators, they show what a positive future our city has.

A friendship to last a lifetime

On an uncharacteristically muggy evening last Thursday, nearly 30 of our youngest tenants met my colleagues and I to begin what I hope will be a long friendship. 

As anyone who works in housing knows, it is mightily difficult to encourage our younger residents to have their voice heard on housing issues. We are all too familiar with the usual suspects of tenant involvement - immensely valuable though they are, but they tend to be white, 60 or 70 something and have been a tenant for some 30 years. We wanted to make a special effort to get views from newer, younger people who may have a perspective we are missing. This is not about replacing one set of tenant views with another but about getting a range of views.

Two of our Future Jobs Fund employees put an enormous amount of energy and creativity into recruiting them and I was pleased to see the room so busy.  I met some people who I immediately thought of as tenant board members of tomorrow, brimming with ideas and the enthusiasm of youth. One young woman, Kelly, particularly impressed me. She had thought up some really challenging questions for me and had some innovative ideas of her own. 

It turned out we had both only been in Wolverhampton a few years but had immediately fallen in love with the people and the general laid back feel of the city. As a single parent with a baby (but engaged to her son's father, getting married next year), Kelly felt older people on her estate looked down on her and made quite wrong assumptions about her behaviour and lifestyle. In fact, she and a girl friend spend a lot of time chewing the fat about what makes a good community and what they might do to help.

She asked me if Wolverhampton Homes would perhaps train up people like her to work with younger people as she already wanted to put something back into the community. I have already put it on my list as something to explore and discussed it with the head of our Local Neighbourhood Partnership which also wants to harness the potential of volunteers. 

Not satisfied with asking me difficult stuff like which person living or dead would I most like to meet (!) - I said Mr Blair on the basis that I still want to know why we went to war - Kelly particularly wanted to know what we are doing to engage 7-16 year olds in council housing. Like many ALMOs we have a range of really exciting projects that we support for example the Timken social enterprise or Goalz (a project with Wolverhampton Wanderers Football Club) but is this really engagement? If I am honest, it’s about trying to prevent antisocial behaviour and control the kids during the holidays! 

We have been struck by the lack of basic life skills amongst our youngsters - managing money, dealing with applications/benefits, cooking, managing a home or garden, dealing pleasantly with neighbours and so on. So for our first young tenants get together we focussed on managing money, particularly how to borrow money sensibly and avoid loan sharks.

Shock tactics worked well here. We showed a video of a young man talking about his l6 years (yes!) of indebtedness to an unauthorised lender who drove him almost to the point of suicide.

I was hugely impressed by how keen the young tenants were to make a difference in their area and learn new skills which they will take with them for life. We can learn so much from them and I look forward to seeing our friendship develop over the years to come.

You can see some more photos of our young Get Together on our facebook page (and we'd love it if you liked us while you were there too!).