Over £23,000 raised to provide Washington youngsters with mobile youth hub

A mobile youth centre and pop-up cafe is up and running thanks to over £23,000 raised on a crowdfunder page
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Oxclose Church, in Washington, raised £23,190 through Crowdfunder Sunderland to convert a double decker Stagecoach bus into a space housing a cafe, confidential listening service and workshop space for young people.

A total of 28 backers helped make the project possible with their support and donations, including £3,000 from NHS Sunderland Clinical Commissioning Group and £3,000 from Sunderland City Council.

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The refurbished bus gives the church the flexibility to run its Ten10 programme of youth work, which hopes to see all young people live ‘Life to the Full’ and have all young people thrive in every aspect of their lives.

Ten10 mobile youth hubTen10 mobile youth hub
Ten10 mobile youth hub

The bus’s lower deck is home to a café with tablets and games consoles, while the upper deck has a confidential listening space and room for workshops. It also has an external extendable awning for outdoor activities.

The flexible space will allow for socialising, relationship building and learning. The church will use the bus to provide activities designed to help reduce instances of anti-social behaviour, as well as workshops on life skills such as budgeting and searching for jobs

Neil McDonald from Oxclose Church, who leads the Ten10 project, said: “The Ten10 project was set up to help us reach more young people in Washington and the surrounding area.

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“We’re interested in the overall wellbeing of young people. This includes physical, mental, emotional, social and spiritual wellbeing - we want to see young people live their best life.

“When looking at ways to work with young people, we realised our existing building was just not big enough, so we started to look at options for creating a new space and thought ‘why not use a bus’!

“Here we are a year later with a fully kitted-out bus. So far, we have seen a really good uptake; on Tuesday nights we regularly have around 20 kids turn up. We hope to take it out soon but we’re still in the testing phase and trying things out to see what the young people want from us - we want them to have a say about what matters to them.”

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