The National Youth Agency: Haringey victory brings MPower to the people

In the latest of our series of winner profiles, we take a look at the London Borough of Haringey's MPower Youth Participation project.

The MPower group is part of a larger community that attends the Markfield Community Centre in Tottenham with their families every week.

The 14 disabled young people, aged 12 to 19, decided to start planning and implementing their own community projects, beginning with the centre's garden, which featured outdated play structures and was inaccessible to many of the young people.

They canvassed the opinions of disabled young people and their families at the centre and visited different play facilities around London in order to gather feedback. They even used symbols and drawing sessions to get the opinions of those in the group who could not communicate verbally. They then commissioned the building of a giant 'Tango Swing', asking as many people as possible to use it, and adapted the apparatus based on their findings. The group designed different attachments to fit people of very different needs, even incorporating a 'den' at the top of the swing full of visually stimulating objects for young people with disabilities such as autism.