The Ireland Funds - Your Money at Work : Belvedere Youth Club

Inner city children engage in activities

“We put in place a program for these kids where we cater for all their spare time needs with constructive and positive youth work.”
- Paul Brady, Belvedere Youth Club

Corporate Citizenship

SEI is a leading global provider of outsourced asset management, investment processing
and investment operations solutions for corporations, financial institutions, financial advisors, and families. In 2007, SEI was exploring ways to engage the interests, energies, and creativity of its staff to make meaningful philanthropy possible for the organisation. Employees were surveyed and areas of interest were determined and it was at this point that the SEI Dublin office approached The Ireland Funds for help in answering some key questions.

How could SEI make its giving strategy an involved and engaged process for its employees?

And how could it best leverage the company’s resources, such as business skills, technology and employee volunteer time?

Following a detailed review of three projects presented by The Ireland Funds, Belvedere Youth Club was selected as the project that met the company’s criteria of an educational project in Dublin’s inner city. In October, 20 employees from SEI repainted the Belvedere Youth Club from top to bottom. Plans are afoot in 2008 for employee volunteers to support the recently established technology suite and to continue to support the Club.

The Ireland Funds spent the day with the Belvedere Youth Club, a project supported by The Ireland Funds which has touched thousands of children in Dublin’s inner city over its almost 90 year history.

This year, the Director of Belvedere Youth Club, Paul Brady, was named the winner of the 2007 Meteor Humanitarian Award. Previous recipients of this award include Elton John, Bono, Christina Noble and Adi Roche and is an indication of how much the Club is regarded in Ireland today. l Born and raised in Dublin's North Inner City, Paul is the youngest of four children and he originally joined the Belvedere Youth Club as a member at the age of 13.

2007 marks 30 years of involvement with the Youth Club first as a member, then as a volunteer and finally as the Club's fulltime Director, a position he has held since 1992. We asked Paul about the Club’s history and how The Ireland Funds have partnered with them to bring change to some of Dublin’s neediest children.

The Belvedere Youth Club is one of the most popular projects in the Inner City for children and for some families it is almost a rite of passage that they join the same club that their parents attended when they were children. I myself joined the Club when I was 13 years old having followed my two older brothers in and indeed my father when he was a newspaper seller on the streets of Dublin over half a century ago. It is this long tradition and history that makes the Belvedere Youth Club special and to this day past members still return to the club for an annual retreat where they recall their own childhoods spent in the Youth Club from decades past.

History
Belvedere Youth Club originated when Belvedere Social Services assumed responsibility for two existing inner city Youth Clubs in 1918. Originally set up by past pupils of Belvedere College to address the issue of poverty among newspaper sellers it was known as the Belvedere Newsboys Club until 1969. In 1972 the Club engaged its first full-time Director and admitted girls as members. Its name was changed to Belvedere Youth Club.

Today
Today the Club is the one of the largest programmes of it’s kind in Ireland and is located on Buckingham Street in Dublin. Over 350 local children ages 7 to 20 make up its membership. Facilities include a sports hall, gymnasium, training kitchen, computer training, a theatre, ceramics and pottery facilities, recreational areas, changing rooms and showers. Belvedere Youth Club currently needs to raise over €170,000 per year and employs three full time staff directly. The Club sponsors a FAS Community employment project, which also allows us to employ up to 14 part-time workers. The North Inner City is one of the most deprived areas in the country. There are a multiplexity of social problems affecting the local communities that we work with such as high criminal involvement of all age groups, drug and substance abuse (among the highest in the country) and low educational achievement coupled with early school leaving is accepted as normal for many families The area has a high percentage of single parent families and the incidence of H.I.V. and AIDS is well above the national average.

Activities offered now include:
A sports coaching programme—Run by a fulltime sports coach, members are coached all year round in a number of different sports. Various leagues and competitions are entered into and the Club represents the North Inner City in the annual community games competing at the national level. Healthy lifestyles and confidence building are some of the issues promoted through this programme.

Drop-in programme—5 nights a week the Club is open to members for recreational and sporting activities. The Club fills the needs of children and young people late into the night when they are most vulnerable of being caught up in criminal activity and/or drug abuse. This programme also promotes voluntarism within the club and is assisted by 3rd level students from various colleges throughout the city.

Holiday Programme—Run from the Club’s cottage in Co. Wexford up to 120 young people are given summer holidays each year. These holidays are free of charge and for most of the children it is the only holiday their families can afford. Situated in the seaside town of Blackwater the facility is in use all year round.

The N.I.C.K.O.L. Project—The Club runs a youth diversion programme, which is a response from the Government’s Department of Justice to address the issue of juvenile crime in the local community. Two fulltime members of staff are employed to implement activities for up to 20 teenagers who have been referred to us by the local Gardai (police). The project is seen as a last chance for some of these teens before a custodial sentence is handed down. School support and regular parental contact are priority issues within this programme.

Computer Training—We have been providing computer literacy classes for many years now and as with all our programmes continuous evaluation keeps programmes relevant. Adapting to the current needs of our members has led us to provide an Internet café type space to operate our computer-training project. The informal environment of the café provides the ideal atmosphere to encourage learning among all age groups.

These are just some of the programmes we offer to the hundreds of children and young people we work with. We could not have achieved these things without the ongoing support and assistance from The Ireland Funds. From the beginning of our redevelopment in the early 1990’s a capital investment grant towards the building of the Club premises occurred thanks to donor advised donations from Ireland Fund supporters Bill Walsh and Hugo MacNeill.

2008 will be another landmark year for the club as we officially celebrate our 90th year in operation in March. This again is an incredible achievement for a voluntary organization and we look to the future, thankful for the many friends we have made through The Ireland Funds. We look forward to improving the lives of the children of Dublin’s Inner City in partnership together.

How The Ireland Funds helped

To date, The Ireland Funds has given approximately $372,000 in support of Belvedere Youth Club.

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*For more information

The Combat Poverty Agency
http://cpa.ie/povertyinireland/childpoverty.htm

End Child Poverty Now Campaign
http://www.endchildpoverty.ie

Connect 2008 article
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John’s Story

The Belvedere Youth Club Theatre Programme has been supported by Ireland Funds’ Board Director Bill Walsh since its inception five years ago.

During a visit from Ireland Funds’ supporters to the Club in 2002, Bill saw first hand the work of the drama group which was due to come to a close due to lack of funding.

After his visit Bill initiated an annual donation that allowed the Club to employ John Whelan, a fulltime drama teacher. John was 7 when he came to the Club and volunteered at 17 to teach drama.

Now 23, John says “I grew up with the Club, it’s part of people’s lives here and it was the only thing that took my friends off the streets. Without it we would have had nothing to do growing up, I believe we would have simply gone wild.”

Bill Walsh’s annual gift has enabled the Club to establish one of the very few youth theatre groups in the Inner City. The annual production is now a much-anticipated event throughout the community with parents, local politicians and teachers among the audience.

Child poverty in Ireland

• 9.7% or 100,000 children are living in consistent poverty. Consistent poverty means that these children are living in households with incomes below 60% of the national median income and experiencing deprivation based on the agreed eight deprivation indicators.

These include:

lack of one substantial meal a day
lack of home heating
family being unable to pay for household expenses without falling into debt.

• 22.7% (or 230,000 children) are living in relative poverty.

• Children in households where parents are unemployed, ill, disabled or where there are 3 or more children are particularly at risk of poverty. In addition, children in lone-parent households are at a very high risk of experiencing poverty.

• Children whose parents never went to secondary school are 23 times more likely to be living in poverty compared to children whose parents had a third level qualification.

• 15% of young people leave school without a Leaving Certificate and 3% with no qualification at all.

• 48,000 families are currently on the waiting list for social housing. Damp, overcrowded, poor quality housing affects children's health and well being.*