Things to Do: Design a youth centre

There are now a number of projects where young people are getting involved in creating the youth facilities of the future.

One such scheme is Southpoint, Blackpool, which is being funded by the government's £270m Myplace youth facilities building programme.

The £4m youth centre is due to open in September 2011 and young people have been involved in every aspect of its creation.

Stuart Dunne, positive contributions manager and lead for young people's involvement at Blackpool Council, says: "We wanted young people's involvement from the start, so we spoke to the members of Blackpool's Young People's Council about the possibility of bidding for a grant for the youth centre. They were keen and so we trained a group of them to give them research skills to carry out wider consultation."

Southpoint is going to be an arts-based centre because Blackpool already has good leisure facilities and Dunne believes this project needs to offer something new.

This arts concept was supported by a consultation with young people and by the council's positive activities team, which noticed it was receiving a high number of applications to its youth opportunity fund for arts and music-based projects.

Dunne says: "The evidence gathered by the young people and the social enterprises they were working with showed there was plenty of opportunity for young people to record music but not to perform."

This information led to the scrapping of the initial design, which the young people thought was clinical and more like a classroom. An internal designer was brought in, who along with the young people, redesigned the layout to include a gig venue that will hold up to 200 people.

"As participation workers we understand our limitations and internal design was one of them. It has been an eye-opener working alongside the designer," says Dunne.

Offering the young people the chance to have a look around other projects has helped them to provide a clear vision of what they want to achieve from the project. They recently visited the Urbis in Manchester city centre and the B'juiced community cafe in Oldham to help inform their ideas.

To ensure that the young people's participation was meaningful, the project leaders found it was most effective to give the decision-making meetings a theme. One theme even included the provision of toilets.

Dunne says: "The meeting enabled the young people to decide that they didn't want to have a male and female toilet because their feelings were that a great deal of bullying takes place in toilets. They chose a unisex area to reduce the opportunity for bullying by having an open washing area."

Nicole Burke, 15, chair of Blackpool's Youth Council who is part of the advisory panel, says: "In terms of skills, we have been working a lot with the architects so you pick up an understanding of how to design a project that I wouldn't have had exposure to otherwise.

"Personally what I have got out of it is a sense of ownership of the project because we have been involved in every step of it from the beginning."

FIND OUT MORE

• The Myplace Support Team provides help to youth projects wanting to create their own youth centres: www.myplacesupport.co.uk.
• The Sorrell Foundation has produced a guide to involving young people in youth centre design: www.thesorrellfoundation.com/ media/pdf/joinedupdesign-for-myplace.pdf.