Community Work
Youth Festival
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Wendover Youth Centre has been running the Youth Festival each year since 2015. The festival is an event where local young people are encouraged to come with their friends and family to participate in a range of activities run by different partners and organisations including sport, inflatables, food, hair braiding and much more!
Our 2024 Youth Festival is on Friday 19 July from 12.30pm - 5.30pm.
Project Engage
The project consisted of two Youth Festivals and summer workshops in art, baking, gardening and music as well as football sessions. We partnered with a number of other organisations during this project to help deliver these workshops.
A massive thank you to the following for their delivery of the workshops: Active in the Community for the football sessions, Youth Concern who provided their music studio, Lindengate for delivering a garden/conservation workshop and Sally O’Halloran who taught baking skills.
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The Youth Festivals were a great success with over 100 young people attending each one at Castle Park. These festivals helped us to advertise the subsequent workshops we provided throughout the summer holidays. In total we ran 19 workshops for 119 young people aged between 11 and 16 years old. The workshops enabled young people to pursue their passions, spend time with friends as well as having something to do in the summer holidays.
Foodbank Donation Week
During this Covid-19 Pandemic key partners in the community including Wendover Youth Centre, Wendover Parish Council, Churches Together in Wendover and the Wendover Foodbank partnered together to run four Foodbank Donation Weeks in Wendover.
Over these three weeks a combined total of 2000kg of food was donated to the foodbank. The Chiltern Foodbank who run and oversee the Wendover Foodbank said what a fantastic effort this was especially in a time of high demand.
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This is now a regular event at Wendover Youth Centre with the next collection week planned for March 2022.
Charity Fundraising Events
Our young people are very passionate about learning, discussing and supporting the work of charities locally and on a national basis. So far this year we have focused on Breast Cancer Awareness, Movember, Anti-bullying and mental health awareness.
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We held themed weeks, set challenges and raised much needed funds for these causes.
Random Acts of Kindness Day
On Thursday 17th February 2022 it was Random Acts of Kindness Day. For this we asked the young people who attend the activities at Wendover Youth Centre to come up with an idea to celebrate this. The young people decided to create artwork and choose a gift (chocolate or candles) to give to members of the local community which St Mary’s Church helped us to identify. Sixteen members of the community received gifts. It was great to see the time and effort the young people put into creating the artwork and the reaction of those community members when they received their unexpected gifts.
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See our report for more photos
Pen Pal Scheme
In March 2020 when the first Covid-19 pandemic lockdown was in place Wendover Youth Centre and St Marys Church spoke with young people who attend both youth provisions. The young people wanted to take part in some social action to support the community in what was a difficult time for all. Their idea was a pen pal scheme where they would write letters to individuals who were maybe feeling vulnerable, lonely or isolated during the lockdown. We received funding from The Local Councillor Covid-19 Emergency Fund and the National Lottery Local Connection Fund to help run the scheme.
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The pen pal scheme involved a total of 25 young people and 25 adult individuals. The scheme started in March and continued through 2020 into 2021. In the summer a scrapbook was printed of the letters for each person to keep as a reminder. We also held an afternoon tea party at the centre so pen pals could meet in person.