“Closed due to unforeseen circumstances”…

You may have seen that on our feeds a couple of times in the past few weeks. Unfortunately, there is a chance you may see it again over the next month or so, and the right thing to do is explain why.

As a children’s charity, the safety and enjoyment of young people is our greatest priority. Ultimately, we exist to bring benefit to their lives.

We have an incredibly skilled, dedicated, and equipped workforce, and the reason we can build such deep and meaningful relationships with young people is because we have consistent staff on both our Junior and Senior sessions. In addition to our core sessions, we’ve also introduced a wider offer delivering intervention workshops and targeted youth work as we are aware that there are young people who aren’t necessarily the right fit for our core sessions, and our promise to be there for young people is there for everyone.

At the beginning of this month, we changed our timetable allowing us to offer this wider programme both within the building and outside of it, throughout the day, and on evenings and weekends. We wanted to launch this at the beginning of the year to minimise confusion – however, we are still in the recruitment process to ensure we have the right team in place.

Until we have a full team, our current staff are working around the clock to deliver this programme – to ensure best practice youth work and a safe delivery, sometimes we are having to prioritise need. In those situations, it may be that rather than operate our core sessions, our staff are better deployed to areas across the town. It could be we’ve had intel of trouble happening somewhere and our team’s presence will help to quicker defuse or prevent the situation, or it may be that a series of safeguarding concerns throughout the day has left us with staff tied up and unable to deliver a full and safe session that evening.

Closure of a session will always be a last resort, and this IS temporary. We just ask you to be patient whilst we get this team in place and trained to our high standards.

With that in mind, if you would like to join the action and help us transform the lives of young people, please register your interest below and we will send you our recruitment pack in due course.

Thank you so much as ever,

Team Inspire