Youth centre gets a helping hand

By Simon Nichols

The Glebe Youth Service (GYS) has this week been granted an additional $150,000 from the City of Sydney to continue operating for another year.
Co-ordinator of the area’s only full-time support service for local youth, Colin Stokes, has welcomed the sponsorship and said it is desperately needed.
‘This year has been very busy,’ he said. ‘We are helping more families than ever with the same budget as previous years. We are really under the gun right now.’
The service was independently established in Glebe 21 years ago, but has only received Council funding of $150 000 per year, since 2004. Current funding from the City will expire on June 30.
The additional money will aid in the co-ordination of daily drop-in forums, nutritional food services, school holiday activities and camps, Girl’s Day activities and the After Dark Program. It also provides the salary for a full-time case worker.
GYS’s After Dark program is one of the most popular and effective initiatives, with an average of 31 young people attending on a Friday or Saturday night at the City’s Peter Forsyth Auditorium.
Over the next twelve months, the After Dark Program intends to incorporate a larger variety of structured youth activities in an effort to attract more females and those less interested in sport.
‘We are working with the city council to expand our repertoire,’ Mr Stokes said. ‘We want to incorporate things like movie nights into what we organize. There is also to opportunity to get more volunteers to come and help out; people like sporting personalities and musicians.’
GYS also intends to employ an Indigenous Youth Worker to focus on leadership and skill development. ‘The Glebe Youth Service has proposed running cultural camps that focus on the pre-colonial history of Australia rather than post-colonial,’ he said.
Mr Stokes is optimistic about the future of the youth service, but only if the Council or State Government can guarantee regular funding.
‘We have a lot of support from the Council,’ he said. ‘The people of Glebe are fantastic as well. It is a very willing suburb with a lot of good will.”