Did you know @littlesimz , @femiondrums and @ajtracey all credit youth clubs with their success.
But here’s the problem: from 2010-2023, more than half of all council-run youth clubs in England closed.
A London study found young people in areas where all nearby clubs shut became 14% more likely to commit crime and performed worse in school.
The good news? The government has just committed £350 million to rebuild youth clubs.
Whether this will be enough, we’ll have to wait and see.
Learn more about the role of youth clubs in preventing young people being affected by violence in our guidance 🔗 (link in bio)
#YouthClubs #ViolencePrevention #YouthWork #CommunitySupport
In May 2014, travelling solo, I passed through Naggar, a town in Kullu Valley, Himachal Pradesh, and decided to stop for a few days. I had no plan apart from needing to pass via Chandigarh to visit family en route to meet Yasmin in Delhi two weeks later. It was raining a lot, so I spent most of the time reading on my guesthouse balcony, peering out over the Beas — one of the five rivers that flows down through Punjab — and the forestry carpeting the mountains that flank it. My host brought me gobi paronthe and chai for breakfast; we ate grilled trout from the river for dinner beside a roaring fire pit on the roof top. On one of my walks around the town, once the sky had cleared, I stumbled upon the former house of Nicolas Roerich, a Russian philosopher and painter who retired to live there for the final 20 years of his life until he died in December 1947, months after partition. I’ve never been as enthused by visual art as I am by literature — words come more naturally to me than images — but seeing Roerich’s work was the first time I appreciated painting on a deeper level. He completed over 7000 across his life, mostly capturing the magical sparseness of the Himalayas. Months later, arriving back in London, I ordered a print of She Who Leads — which Roerich painted as a tribute to his wife, Helena, a force in her own right — that now hangs in my study. I stare at it every day. #travel #roerich #himachal #naggar #paintings
Rumi. You’re nine weeks old, so the newborn blur is slipping into the past. I can sense that you’re becoming a little sentient boy. You tug on my beard and stare curiously in the mirror. All day we chase your smiles, which are still in that sweet spot between being rare enough to feel like a gift but common enough to give us hourly joy. Your Mama is recovered, thankfully, and now able to enjoy this time fully, like she deserves to. I’m settled back at work but trying to focus in online meetings when I can hear you cry in the next room is the hardest thing. Everyone keeps saying these days will go by so fast, so make the most of them. I am trying. My favourite ritual of ours, which I never could have predicted, is watering the grass seeds I planted shortly after you were born in our new garden. It always seems to calm you down.
She picked up a pen in prison — but didn’t believe she could call herself a poet.
In this clip from Safe with @ciaranthapar , @lady_unchained reflects on identity, self-doubt, and finding her voice.
#YouthJustice #CreativeWriting #Poetry #FreeFlow #Safe #YEF #Unchained
I’ll be in conversation with @andyphilosophy — whose book, The Life Inside, informed the hit BBC television drama, Waiting For The Out, earlier this year — as part of the new @nottinghilllitfest at @harrow.club next month. All proceeds will be going towards the venue, one of west London’s oldest youth clubs. We’ll be talking all things youth, justice, freedom, philosophy and writing memoir. Join us 💪
🎙️ New episode of SAFE out now @ciaranthapar is joined by Lady Unchained for a powerful conversation on how creative writing can unlock expression, even in the most restrictive environments. Drawing on her own experience in custody, @lady_unchained shares how poetry became a lifeline — offering hope, reflection, and a path toward change.
Through her work on Free Flow on National Prison Radio, she’s helping people across the UK prison system find their voice and imagine a different future.
🖊️ “Let’s imagine life without a conviction. Let’s imagine you outside.”
This episode explores how writing in a prison context can:
• Create space for honesty and self-reflection
• Challenge people to think beyond their current reality
• Offer a safe outlet for emotions that often go unspoken
Listen now and be part of the conversation (link in bio).
#YouthJustice #CreativeWriting #Rehabilitation #FreeFlow #SecondChances Unchained
Both Grandma Sheila and Gramps were raised in houses next to Cove Brook, a distant tributary of the Thames that flows quietly past overgrown fields, rusty playgrounds and residential roads in Farnborough, Hampshire. They swam in it as children whilst war planes from the nearby base of the British army in Aldershot were tested above them. Playing alongside it, Grandma was once gifted a slice of fruit cake by a group of Italian prisoners who had been tasked with clearing out its muck, a rare treat against a backdrop of rationing. Years after the war finished, with Gramps’ father, a man of many secrets, having returned from victory in Burma, they courted on walks beside the water in their teens, crossing it to attend dances at the local community hall. The garden of their first and only home together, where Mum was born in 1961 — a muddy, pig-trodden strip of farmland that they would spend the next six decades turning into a green, flowery vista — backed directly onto the brook’s path.
Two years ago, with Gramps no longer around, Grandma decided it was finally time to sell up and move out. So Mum and I took a slow walk with her along the brook. We talked about family history, most of which is open, curious and inoffensive in a quaint, small-town-English kind of way, but some of which sits awkwardly behind a wall-of-silence constructed over many years that has required chipping away at as I write my next book, leading to some profound discoveries. I wandered around the garden for the final time, took a few blunted tools from Gramps’ carpentry shed as keepsakes that now sit on shelving in my own garage and found some old classical vinyls in the loft that I’m looking forward to playing on my sound system when I get it set up later this year.
Violence. Gender inequality. Gentrification. Corporate greed. Racism. Child poverty. Whether you work on one of these issues or you want to raise awareness about how they affect you or your community, telling powerful stories has never been more urgent. Without them, things stay the same.
When I was a teenager, I started writing a daily diary. This turned into a blog, then a side hustle career as a journalist alongside my youth and education work. Eventually, by writing my book, Cut Short, I became an author and now I oversee communications at @youthendowfund — shaping stories to make change at the highest level of research and policy when it comes to keeping young people safe.
Every month I teach Writing for Social Impact at City St George’s, University of London. It’s an online course that distils everything I’ve learned from 10 years of combining frontline work, charity communications and journalism into two consecutive mornings. It’s an exploratory space for discussion, sharing and feedback, for anyone who feels compelled to use their pen to make change. People join from all over the world and leave with a spring in their step on their journey as a writer.
Join us via the link in my bio ✍️
There is one funded space on every course for a 18-25 year old - to apply, email me on [email protected] explaining why you’d like to attend 💪
