Making a diference

THERE is a school of thought currently gaining traction that the Church of Scotland should stop measuring its success or otherwise by the bald statistics of names on rolls, posteriors on seats on Sunday mornings or how people define themselves in social attitude surveys and census returns.

Instead, this argument goes, the Church should be trying to judge itself by less countable things such as lives touched and communities improved.

And while it may well be that this is partly down to a desire to come up with a rosier public image than empty pews and closed buildings, it’s certainly true that the Church continues to have a positive impact on the lives of thousands if not tens of thousands of people across Scotland who aren’t members and who are rarely to be seen at services.

Possibly nowhere is this more pronounced than in the various youth work projects going on all over the country, but especially in the ‘Priority Areas’ – the 64 parishes that are in the top 5% in the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD), which identifies the areas that score worst on statistics for health, education, employment, crime and other measures.

They are the areas of Scotland with some of the worst problems – but also the scene of some of the Church’s greatest successes. And with the ever-growing pressures on public services, they are needed more than ever.

In the Blackhill/Provanmill area of north east Glasgow, which is 47th on the SIMD list, youth crime has dropped to less than 10 per cent of what it was 10 years ago (from 116 reported crimes in 2006 to two in 2016). Much of the credit for this dramatic turnaround lies with the St Paul’s Youth Forum, an arm’s-length charity which grew out of the youth club of St Paul’s Church.

Neil Young, who manages the project, says that its impact is based on ‘listening to young people, saying that we realise this is a problem, and asking what we can do to help’.

“When I started, there had been a union of two churches and, instead of having two ministers, the Session decided they wanted to do something to support young people.

“There were a lot of problems with gang violence, and alcohol and drug abuse was rife, so a lot of our energy was directed towards working alongside the community, to create alternative ideas and outlooks.”

From a youth night for teenagers once a week, the Youth Forum has mushroomed into a seven-day-a-week operation with clubs for all ages; community youth radio station Bolt FM; residential trips to places such as the Compass Christian Centre in Glenshee and the Iona Community’s Camas centre on Mull; and food project Blackhill’s Growing, under which the group grows its own vegetables, and keeps chickens and bees and learns how to cook with the produce.

Attempting to tackle food poverty in a dignified way, they invite local people in for meals, sometimes cooked in their own outdoor pizza oven and including toppings from their own poly tunnels.

They have just started a new cycling project, trying to reduce the number of children being driven to the local primary school; and some of the young people are now being trained in using drones for high-level filming, with the possibility of working with the local housing association to check buildings without having to put up scaffolding.

All of this, Neil says, is driven by the young people themselves. “All these bits and pieces stem from the young people’s ideas, and we support and nurture them.

“The charity trustees are almost 50 per cent young people, who do things like staff appraisals and setting staff wages. They are the ones with the power and control, and our staff are there to support the young people’s dreams – however creative they are.

“There is a real sense of belonging. Some of the young people are here just about every day.

“We don’t bar anyone. We have worked with young people who have caused thousands and thousands of pounds of damage, but we have a message of grace. No matter what they do, we’ll say ‘see you tomorrow’ – and that’s really challenged a number of young people because they are expecting to be excluded. “We are now dealing with kids with huge mental health issues, helping to mop up problems which social work services no longer have the capacity for. A number of them are in care, or being looked after through kinship care, and we’re just making sure they feel loved and wanted and know that they are cared for.”

To underscore the value of the work, Neil gives the example of one man, a former user of the service, who is convinced he would have been in prison by now if it wasn’t for the Youth Forum.

“With this young man, the Church of Scotland’s investment of £1200 (for an international residential) has saved the state probably millions of pounds. That’s the dramatic difference that the church makes. Through Christ’s work, lives are transformed.”

Overseeing the Church’s Priority Areas engagement is the Priority Areas Committee within the Ministries Council. Their work is supported by a core team of six people based in the Priority Areas office in Glasgow. Since late last year, the team has been headed up by Shirley Grieve, former manager of the Church’s grantmaking Go For It fund (which helps fund many projects that are tackling poverty.).

Shirley says that taking an ‘assets-based’ approach is fundamental to the Priority Areas work: building on what is already there, being led by local people, using expertise that already exists, and connecting communities and churches so they can share resources and experiences and learn from each other. It’s also key to make sure that the people in the communities feel they are partners in the work, not just the recipients of charity.

“‘Nothing about us, without us, is for us,’ is a statement of our principles,” says Shirley. “We would never parachute into an area with well-meaning ‘solutions’. Without the full involvement of local people – the real experts – the work wouldn’t be sustainable.”

She says Priority Areas are involved with a ‘raft of approaches’ to tackling poverty. “We work closely with a number of partner agencies, including Faith in Community Scotland and WEvolution to offer a wide range of support.”

Another partner organisation which started as a Priority Areas project but is now an independent charity is the GK Experience, which supports youth work across Scotland through training, providing additional volunteers and offering residential experiences. It is led by Alex Bauer, who says the organisation arose from the findings of a review of Priority Areas youth work. “It found that there were some real positives but also identified some weaknesses in terms of what the national church was achieving and what local churches were offering.

“In some areas there was little training available, particularly for volunteers. Also, with the obvious exceptions of the uniformed organisations, there was very little work going on with young people aged over 11 – so children would get to P7 age and then their needs weren’t being met, either on Sunday morning or in the community.

“And the last finding was that the church was struggling to work with the most vulnerable young people, even within Priority Areas. Often these are young people who lead very chaotic lives, and wouldn’t naturally engage with organisations like youth clubs.”

The the GK Experience programme is in four parts, of which the highest-profile is probably the residential programme, including to the Abernethy Trust’s Glenkin centre from which the organisation takes its name.

“We run up to 14 residentials a year for young people, who are referred often by youth workers or ministers, sometimes teachers, sometimes parents or caregivers,” says Alex. “They can come on many of the trips, including up to three weeks in the summer, so theyare building a relationship with us over long periods of time.”

Residentials can be based around arts, sports and outdoor activities.

“I guess the thinking of this is that as a church we need to be in the business of identifying young people who have potential to be quite brilliant, but don’t have access to the same opportunities as young people from other areas,” says Alex.

“A residential experience is hugely transformational. It helps young people to develop in confidence and self-esteem. They learn a lot of life skills and access activities that often would not be accessible to young people from backgrounds of poverty – snowsports, abseiling, kayaking, canoeing – and they get to do them to a reasonably high level. We have got stories of young people who gone on to be outdoor instructors.”

The second part of their work is locallybased, working alongside congregations and communities. One example is the Milton Arts Project, run by Colston Milton Parish Church, which the GK Experience aresupporting with a team of their own volunteers.

They also run a young leader programme, The Young Team, under which young people from both Priority Areas and other communities live and are trained together. And finally, they have a programme which works with other agencies to provide additional intensive support for young people where needed.

A recurring theme of the Priority Areas work is attempting to lift the stigma associated with living in areas that are often perceived as synonymous with crime and drugs.

“One of the key messages for us is that these are good places, not problem areas,” says Shirley Grieve. “Good people live there and good things happen, but we need to support and be with local people. It’s a Gospel imperative for the whole church to be with the poorest communities.”

Arguably there is nowhere more notorious in Scotland than the Glaswegian suburb of Easterhouse.

“I love Easterhouse,” says Debbie McMahon, child and youth development worker at Easterhouse Parish Church, “And I find myself defending it quite a lot.”

Debbie manages BEE (Brighter East End), another church-based charity. They run after-school groups, creative arts groups, a youth group called Hive, and a fitness session for ages 14-plus. Again, the young people themselves are heavily involved – even the name was chosen by a young user of the group, and they are consulted on each term’s programme.

She tells the story of finding herself on a charity placement in Berkshire, and people there thinking of Easterhouse as a place full of crime. “It gets an unfair reputation,” she says.

But that association rubs off on local young people. “We recently did a project with some young people asking what they would change about Easterhouse. Out of anything they could have chosen they wanted to change other people’s perception of Easterhouse. They had such a terrible vision of how others perceived people, particularly young people, from the area.

Photos: Easterhouse Church Project

“People think nobody works and everybody drinks and smokes, and it isn’t like that. There are so many good people and there is so much good stuff happening.”

Photos: St Paul’s Youth Forum

While many of the Priority Areas are in Glasgow, it’s not just in the west that there’s poverty.

Rock Solid is yet another arms-length charity, set up by Douglas and Mid Craigie Church in Dundee. It is led by Neil Campbell.

Neil says: “The church had a very successful children’s ministry, Livewire, which runs on a Friday night, but nothing for the children to move on to once they left.

“I was asked to look at this and see if we could develop something with the young people in the community for them. So I started working with a small group of about seven young people, who were in primary 7 (age 11-12 )at the time. We started a small youth group they chose to call Rock Solid, and it very quickly took off and grew, and before long we had more young people than we knew what to do with.

“So myself and a team around us realised there were some unmet needs in the community.”

They set up as a charity four years ago; and from that initial seven they now work with an average of about 60 different young people a week, through a range of different communities based activities and projects.

“We have a social enterprise group which makes crafts and sell them, and they choose how to reinvest the money. We also have an employability programme working with local schools and colleges, and we run a John Muir accredited outdoor education programme.

“Also a health and wellbeing programme, and Food on Friday a community café that young people are quite involved in, as well as one-off events.”

Again, the emphasis is on young people taking as much of the responsibility as possible.

“We don’t believe at all in a top down approach,” says Neil. “We don’t tell young people what they should be doing, and we are not trying to run a programme of activities where we are doing things for or at young people.

“We use a community develop model called co-production. Each programme we run is led by a steering group made up of young people, staff and committee members, and maybe people from other agencies and organisations.

“And they work together to design a programme of activities with the young people participating, and they review that and hold it accountable. We have an ethos of young people not just being involved, but taking the lead where possible.”

While the emphasis in all of these projects is mostly on community work rather than mission, it’s also clear that this sort ofwork is a crucial – maybe the only – way for churches to engage with young people who aren’t otherwise going to have anything to do with them.

Neil Young estimates that 90 percent of the young people at St Paul’s believe in God, and 85 percent of those pray regularly. He talks of fascinating conversations around faith amongst the many young people ofvaried backgrounds who use their services.

And Neil Campbell adds: “There are a few who might be put off slightly by the barrier they perceive of Rock Solid being in a church. There has been a perception that the intent is to evangelise or proselytise, but that’s not the purpose of the project.

“Howeverwe do have young people who express interest in faith through coming here, and I run a youth fellowship group and we have now got a handful of young people involved in the church.

“It’s providing the opportunity foryoung people to explore faith if they wish to do that. It isn’t an either/or for us in the church – eitherwe have to be a community based project and do away with religion, or we have a project which is overtly Christian which is set out to try and bring people into the church.

Photos: The GK Experience

“The mission is both of those things. It’s doing the social justice and being missional as well, and they can complement each other and we can be honest about that.”