Youth Work

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Wales 2009

Wales 2009

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Bike Europe

Bike Europe 2007

The triumphant Bike Europe team returned to the Swift Centre escorted by other young people from the youth club on Saturday 8th September 2007.

Just 38 days after leaving Plaistow the five-strong team had cycled the 1900 miles from London to Bilbao in Spain raising over £7,000 for the Swift in the process.

Find out more about Bike Europe by visiting the official website - bikeeurope.org.uk

Bike Newham

Bike Newham 2007

Bike Newham, Bike Europe's sister project, was inspired entirely by the excitement generated at the Swift by the Bike Europe project. The Bike Europe team were heavily involved in organising and running the Bike Newham project utilising the skills gained from their ride through Europe.

The project enabled young people to plan and take part in a range of cycling activities.

Workshops involved practical hands-on activities on:

  • cycle maintenance
  • safe cycling techniques
  • route planning
  • map reading
  • first aid
  • expedition planning
  • camp craft
  • nutrition for performance activities
  • training and stretching regimes

Morden Baptistas

Friend of the Swift and youth leader at our summer camp, Jem Rogers, helped to start a football team at his church in Morden, SW London in 2006. Jem invited some of the older young people of the Swift to come along and play for his team, however the interest was so great they had start two teams - Morden Thirst and Morden Baptistas.

Morden Baptistas

Both teams started playing every Saturday near Wimbledon in the 3rd division of the Southern Area Christian Football League. Originally Daniel Crisp, Matthew Crisp, Paul Clewett and Matt Burnett joined the Morden Baptistas and soon became key team members. Other members of the Swift, including Simeon Burnett and Corey Lamothe, soon joined the Baptistas and ensured our first ever season finished with promotion to Division 2 and silverware in the form of the Challenge Trophy.

Our second season was also very successful and we acheived promotion to the top division. By now the Swift had become a sort of 'feeder' club for the Baptistas with several more talented Swift footballers pulling on the white and blue strip (in no particular order) - Julian Lamothe, Kevin Kiruthi, Ian Bateman and Terry Hawkey.

We are now half way through our 3rd season and the players from the Swift are among the most consistent in the team - despite having to travel to the other side of London every week. We've had a tough start to this season with injuries, changes in personnel and several undeserved defeats but we remain confident and hope to get back on track soon.

Leadership Programme

In 2006 we began to offer club members a chance to participate in the leadership programme. About a dozen members completed the first programme.

The content changes slightly from one course to the next because some important parts are generated by the participants.

The age range of our first course was from 13-20 years.

The course is very interactive and requires participants to think and engage with it.

It aims to do the following:

  1. Get participants to think about what leadership skills are, who has them, how are they demonstrated, who have they seen use leadership skills and when has it been done well or badly.
  2. Identify which sklls are appropriate in different settings
  3. Recognise that every leader has a 'style' of leadership and reflect on their owwn 'style'
  4. Meet with people who are recognised leaders and examine the principles that guide them and the styles that they adopt. We met with the Mayor of Newham Sir Robin Wales and West Ham MP, Lyn Brown amongst others.
  5. Introduce working as a group or a committee, with each member taking on a role and having a function to perform
  6. Giving that committee a task to perform, 'design an activity, recruit people to it, run it'. This was done over several weeks and included running a football tournament, organising the painting of a room in the youth club and organising games at the annual club camp.
  7. At each stage participants were encouraged to reflect upon what they had done, what had worked well or not worked at all and what they could do differently if they were do do it again.
  8. The conclusion was a reflection on leadership, the course and Kipling's poem 'If'.

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