Voluntary Work - Hulme After School Club (Adventure Playground)

I started working at an after school club on a thursday night with kids from the age of 4 to 16. Unfortunately I was late finding out about it and had to wait for a CRB check to come through so I missed out on a big chunk of the term but I still managed to get involved at the end and get to know a few of the children. They were great! Although pretty scary at times!

The objective was for 'childrens university' set up by the Manchester Metropolitan (MMU) to go into the adventure playgroung youth club in Hulme on a thursday night to get involved with the children and teach them about art and the environment. The kids were taught all about how recycling benefits the world that we live in and given examples of the damage that we put on the world like the melting of the ice caps. They were told that by recycling we can prevent it from happening.
All of the children then got together and with the help of the volunteers gathered objects that they wanted to recycle and took them into the youth club. So we had a huge collection of cereal boxes and egg boxes and milk cartons and cardboxes. Because the children had been told about the recycling benefit on the rainforests and the icy areas of the world, they started to make a rainforest including all of the animals and trees out of recycled objects and the same again for ice land. The ice land also included under water so there was lots of fish! The kids also set to work on making a model of Manchester as it produces a lot of polution which is very hard on the environment. The kids loved finding out about these factors. They could be factors that would be very boring for a child but it is important and so by encorporating art and fun into their learning they were happy and willing to participate.
One little girl in particular I grew a soft spot for. She was adorable. I helped her make a two story house with an attick and a stair case. And it was beautifully decorated in dots because as she explained "My mummy says I'm dotty, so I'm guna make my house dotty!", and it had an ace little man with a dog and a sofa and TV.
There were a few chalenges in the work as a lot of the kids had finished school and consumed however many E numbers before they had got there which made it all...Interesting. Luckily there was a few youth workers on hand that knew how to sort them out and break up fights which was very useful as even in the short time me working there I saw plenty of punched noses...Aren't they cute! There were also challenges in that the child isn't allowed to be handled which can become a problem if a child falls over and they want a hug. This is all down to happenings in the past with stories of child abuse and other unimaginable things. People are trying to be so careful now.
In the last week of working with the kids, we took them all over from Hulme adventure playground to MMU link gallery which was a scary experience trying to shift that many kids over busy roads but we got there safe in the end. In the link gallery the volunteers set up all of the children's work into 3 sections, the first being Manchester, the second being the rainforest and the third being Ice land and the sea. This was a great experience for the children as they got to see all of there work up on the gallery walls which must have made them feel really proud of themselves. The children's work was also put into a competition where three pieces of work were going to be selected as the winners and the wining children got a reward. All of the children from this also got a certificate and the those children over 7 got a passport which they can get stamped every time they complete something from children's university again.
This was such a great thing for these children as without trying to sound stereotypical, unfortunately due to living in a disadvantaged area only few of these children will experience higher education. In their situation very little people around them will go to university and so the child wouldn't be very likely to aspire towards this. And so by introducing childrens university to them they are getting and insight into the achievements that they can make.
Because of the economic crisis that out country is in now there has been a cut in the grant to Manchester Young Lives (an organisation run, providing the same facilities across Hulme, Whythenshawe, Ardwick and Moss Side) of £75,000 meaning that Hulme adventure play ground has had to shut down. This is a major problem! The children of that area needed the youth centre. It provided counciling if they needed it, the safety of a confined and supervised area for them to play in. It kept them from the dangers of the street and even gave a few of them an escape and an insight into a better life. It is really sad to see this taken away from them.

But conservatives hey! All for the rich and none for the poor