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ChildrenThumbs Up! Club - Lewes Whitehawk play and adventure project - Brighton |
Thumbs Up! Club - LewesLewes is a very picturesque town between Brighton and Eastbourne, with a fourteenth century castle, a prison and a lot of young families. The Thumbs Up Club provides an after school play scheme. Whitehawk Play and Adventure Project - BrightonWhitehawk is a large public housing estate on the edge of Brighton. It is relatively newly built, but unemployment and crime is high and there are large numbers of children with nothing to do when they're out of school. Staff at the project provide support for many different activities, such as an athletics club, ... They are also responsible for organising a large summer play and activity scheme known as WHATS TO DO. |
Young PeopleIt seems the teenage years are becoming increasingly fraught. Modern life presents a bewildering array of choice and opportunity - but modern society is not always helpful in guiding young people through those choices. PACT's work with these people centres on providing information and counselling services to help them pick their way through the maze of decisions presented at every corner - e.g. housing, relationships, health, sex, money, education, and so on. Our two projects are OPEN DOOR, in Eastbourne, and the YOUNG PEOPLES CENTRE, in Brighton. Both provide somewhere to go when you don't know where to go to get what you want - and someone to listen who won't judge you or tell you what to do. |
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PACT Home Page : Our work : How you can help : Getting in touch
Information
To be truly useful any service for young people must be approachable, easy to use and gain their trust and respect. Open Door and Young Peoples Centre are entirely confidential services, which cost nothing to use. They reflect young people's views - rather than imposing someone else's - but also recognise and respect different people's ideas and lifestyles. They do not impose stereotypes of what young people's problems should be - not everyone is experimenting with drugs or sex, for example - but listen to each person and help them to address their particular needs.
Information is provided openly on every subject that has ever been asked for - and some that haven't yet! It may be prospectuses for colleges, information on bus times or football matches - or it may be educational literature on sex or drugs. Both Open Door and Young Peoples Centre maintain a library of information which is freely available to local young people.
Counselling
Sometimes just the information isn't enough - you need help to piece together the various parts of your life to try and make sense of them. Counselling is far from readily available to anybody without the money to pay for it and most waiting lists will be months long.
A team of well-trained volunteer counsellors is available at both projects, offering open-ended emotional support. The emphasis is firmly on taking an holistic approach to the persons life - in other words trying to avoid dealing with each problem in isolation by considering the sum of the effects of all the problems on the whole person.
Tell us about your work
- Do you work with young people?
- What are your views on services such as Open Door and Young Peoples Centre?
Let us know by mailing us at -
Open Door - OpenDoorEastbourne@pact.org.uk
Young Peoples Centre - ypc@pact.org.uk
Updated 25/11/02