Youth leader calls for more work with migrant young people

Slough YMCA chief executive Colin Young, who works with young migrants, said frontline youth services were trusted by immigrants and could provide daily contact.

Speaking ahead of today's (Monday) International Youth Day, which this year celebrates youth migration, Young said his experiences working with Roma Gypsy children and young people in Chalvey, Slough also demonstrated the importance of local youth services having sufficient funding to recruit youth workers with language skills.

“I want to see more work going to frontline charities that are actually dealing with issues on the streets, not going through the big organisations such as job centres,” said Young.

“They don’t necessarily assist people – whereas we have daily information and trust. If social services is looking for someone they can ring us, as can the police.”

Young manages the Hangout drop-in youth centre that has provided activities such as sports and homework clubs for three years.

It is open to the whole community, but mainly attended by Roma Gypsy young people.

“Before we opened the centre there was nowhere for them to go – there was high crime and three- and four-year-olds wandering the streets at 10 O’clock at night,” he said.

“We’ve had fantastic results with schools saying how much the young people’s English and behaviour has improved.”

Young says the success is partly due to a £60,000 grant from Children in Need that enabled the YMCA to employ a Romanian native-speaker 18 months ago.

“She knows more about the Romas’ background and is also a qualified interpreter, so she helps us with our work with the police and social services,” he said.

Young’s comments were backed by YMCA Cambridgeshire and Peterborough project manager Nancy Stapleton, who runs its Reaching Communities project.

She said hiring a native speaker to help work with young Lithuanian and Polish children referred to YMCA services had improved the organisation’s work with young migrants.

“They understand the cultural differences and when something is and is not a safeguarding issue,” said Stapleton.

She called the government invest more in youth work to enable frontline services to hire and train native-language speakers.