Dear OnSiders,

I am delighted, over the moon, happy as Larry, even as happy as Harry Redknapp, though not because I have escaped the grasps of the HMRC, but because like a football manager I have made an audacious double signing for OnSide. For an undisclosed fee, I can’t tell you how much, but it’s somewhere between 1 & -1, I have played a blinder and recruited a Dream Team of Warren Hegg (Lancashire & England) and Marc Studholme (Bolton!) to head up our forthcoming Charity Golf Day which will be held at Mere Golf & Country Club on 15th May.

The event will be known as The ‘Warren Hegg Golf Classic’. Warren had a glittering career playing cricket for Lancashire and had the honour of representing England on two occasions. Warren now works for Lancashire CC as a Development Officer and when asked if he would lead our Charity Golf Day he said “I am thrilled to be involved with such a worthwhile charity like OnSide, which is making a difference in the lives of our future generations. I’m looking forward to a competitive, but fun game of Golf in May and hope you can join us”.

I did warn Warren that the last time I asked someone to head up a Golf Day (Francis Lee) it turned into a bit of a life sentence, Franny is still going strong 23 years later and to date has raised over £300,000 for Bolton Lads & Girls Club through his golf day.

So we have a Leader and now we needed someone to pull everything together, a Fergie, a Barberoli, a tournament organiser. I knew just the man, step forward Marc Studholme. Marc is already a friend and supporter both of OnSide and the Factory Youth Zone.

Marc is passionate about our mission to support and invest in young people by simply giving them a safe and decent place to go in their leisure time. He is just the man to put in the “hard yards” and make the inaugural Warren Hegg Golf Classic a success.

So on behalf of everyone at OnSide a huge thank you to Warren & Marc and here’s to a great day. Keep an eye on our Events page as we will be posting details of how to enter a team.

Jerry Glover – Chief Executive

Can our Youth Zones help children escape the poverty trap?

The latest Government figures on Child Poverty make depressing reading. Apparently we have a target that says the aim by 2020 is to get figures to down to 10% of all children in the UK living in poverty. Which is an odd kind of target when you think about it!

I suppose we all need targets of one kind or another and it does make us happy when we achieve them. There is a great story that Gordon Brown used to love nothing more than increasing one benefit or another and then calculating that as a result he had “lifted” say 10,000 children out of poverty, and go home beaming because he had done a cracking days work. In reality he had done no such thing, giving a family on benefits an extra £15 a week made no real difference to any of their lives, particularly the children.

OnSide’s second Youth Zone is set to open later this month, it is in Harpurhey in North Manchester. The Government’s figures tell us that 49% of children in Central Manchester are being brought up in poverty (the second highest rates in the country). We can’t give all the kids that come through the door a tenner a week and lift them out of poverty .. so what can we do?

We can help all the Children and Young People who come through the doors to start to feel good about themselves, to start believing in themselves, have confidence become active, engaged, and positive about themselves and others. I’m sure that is the start of the long journey away from benefits and poverty. If the young people that we work with remain on benefits then they will always be poor… even if we trebled the rates and we at OnSide and at The Factory Youth Zone will have failed.

We hope that by this time next year over 1500 children and young people will attend The Factory every week and that after a few years we are determined that those young people will be engaged, motivated, confident, happy and ambitious.

Read more about The Factory Youth Zone by visiting its website, click here for more information.

I didn’t know it but we are part of a movement…

When OnSide started about 3 years ago, I saw our work as all about young people in terms of; helping them, investing in their futures and giving them choice and opportunities.

But it is possible to see OnSide as part of a bigger movement which is all about communities, localism and building from the bottom up. Like minded people are out there and are coming up with creative and different ways to lead change in their areas. For example an interesting group called Spacemakers, set up in 2009 with the aim of doing something about the decaying shopping arcades and High Streets, which they saw as being a blot on their own landscape. Their first project was The Granville Arcade in Brixton, they got the owners, the council and local people together and now it’s alive with small local fledgling businesses.

OnSide is doing so much more than invest in young people, perhaps the really great thing is the opportunity our Youth Zones present for local people, councils and business to come together and regenerate a whole Community, through a desire to improve the lives of local young people.

It doesn’t take much to get people active, most of the time they want to be involved in improving the places where they live and they certainly want to invest both time and money in young people!

Some of the interesting groups doing similar things…

Space Makers
Grow Sheffield
Just Add Spice

Jerry Glover
CEO – OnSide North West

If you want to support OnSide and help improve our local towns and cities, the click here to Get OnSide.