Al Risaalah Youth

Al-Risaalah Youth Empowering North London's Future Leaders

Al-Risaalah Youth is a volunteer-led organisation offering high quality social, professional and educational opportunities for young people in north London. The Friday Youth Club was started on February 2019 with a small group of forward-thinking young people with full support and backing of the elders of the community. Young people are involved in the planning, researching, decision making and running of the club. This in turn gives them a sense of empowerment and responsibility and creates a sense of ownership and commitment.

By understanding on another’s skills and forte’s, we separated ourselves into four different teams:

- A Managerial team with the Head and Secretary.
- An Activities team in charge of running the weekly club (equipment, safety etc.), football sessions (every Saturday) and large-scale summer trips.
- An Educations team focussing on providing the youth with the professional skills they need to excel academically by assisting them in applying to the top universities and counselling them on their goals and how to reach them. This often requires us to seek professionals with running counselling sessions with our close partner, “Habib Counselling”.
- A Media team who head all marketing through designing leaflets and recording lectures and seminars, taking photographs and videos of our programs to attract more youth and running all our social media platforms (YouTube, Instagram and Twitter)

We then set tasks for every team and have collective meetings monthly (whereas individual team meetings can be as much as thrice a week) to discuss progress and plans for the future. As aforementioned, all our projects are self-funded and all members work on purely volunteer basis.

The Work Done By Al Risaalah Youth

Al Risalaah Youth aims to provide as many opportunities as possible to the youngsters to participate in various activates and learn new skills as well as networking with likeminded young people.

Below will be listed off our current projects along with future project we are looking to carry out. The future projects require more financial backing as well as more resources which we hope to gain.

Projects Current Projects Weekly Friday Youth Club:

We run a weekly Youth Club provision operating on a Friday evening from the Islington Islamic Centre. The members set their own programme of activities, meaning they are age appropriate and enjoyable. Activities include table tennis, play station games and board games. The youth club is timed deliberately in the evening hours to prevent the youth from going into the streets, but rather keeping them engaged, entertained and enriched.

We provide a space to play Two PS4 with FIFA19, Table Tennis, board games such as chess and checkers and Four Squares. In addition to that we end weekly group activity with ice breaking games where by teams compete against each other as rounding game such racing blind folded with commands or listening games.

Finally, we provide a Free Pizza Session to all attendees free of charge and other refreshments such as soft drinks and snacks. This is the biggest cost of the Friday Youth Club and would need much needed support as it is not viable for the committee to cover it continuously as the majority of the members are either students or financially tight young people. We are seeking new ways to find funds to help alleviate the financial pressure that our committee are facing and allow the sessions to continue.

Group Mentoring/Catch ups:

Currently the Friday Youth Club has a positive culture towards mentoring with the volunteers and vulnerable high-risk attendees in which we run small informal group sessions to explore the issues they face in their personal lives as well as school. We have built a good rapport with them and set small targets for the attendees individually. The Al Risaalah Youth Committee would love to expand with added empathies on 1-to-1 mentoring session for those are most vulnerable and need some guidance.

Saturday Football Session:

We run weekly indoor football session for those who attend Friday Youth Club and require the youth to sign up prior to attending to ensure adequate health and safety standards can be upheld. Weekly/Monthly sign-up sheet is sent out with small cost of £4 a session from each player cover the cost to run the sessions and pay towards the hiring costs currently needed to secure the large hall for Al Risalaah Youth to use. The football session is in high demand and has subsequently required a waiting list that excees numerous weeks as there is a surplus of attendees and a lack of funding to run the sessions safely with the current limitations we face. This further supports the requirement for further funding to ensure that these youth can have a safe and secure space to exercise.

Our long terms aim would be to run the football session at no costs to allow for those of lower incomes to partake and increase the youth engagement we have with our exercise programmes.

Day Trips

During the school holidays the Al Risaalah Youth organise small day trips or outings for the youth; previous trips include excursions to Thorpe Parks on Summer Eid 2019, bowling tounaments, Go-Karting trips and eat-outs. This allows a freedom to collectively share experience, and build team morale and stronger friendships.

Future Projects

Summer Camp:

Al Risaalah Youth would like to expand do conduct summer youth camps as well give opportunities to the youth of north London and surrounding areas to learn new skills that they may have not had a chance to experience such as horse riding, cannoning and learn how to cook. We have an idea in the works for summer 2020 a trio to wales in process of planning.

Furthermore these trips including tailor made programs would pose to serve a greater goal allow attendees to build valuable life skills as such generate ideas for the future, organise outreach events, build confidence with public speaking lessons, teamwork workshops and further engaging youth in their community and conclude their experiences by curating a community project on their own.

Mental health workshops:

Mental Health is considered a taboo in the community which majority of the young people in Al Risaalah Youth come from; we have a vision to change that negative culture and introduce a healthy and open culture towards destigmatising the taboo surrounding mental health. Along with Habib Counselling we are closely looking to roll out a new programme for upcoming academic year in areas such as Emotional Wellbeing and Managing Stress. This will shine a light on topics as well as giving them resources and ways in which they can deal it if they ever come to need mental health services.

This programme is designed to prevent avoidance of mental health services and develop a positive, responsible culture in seeking support when young people recognise symptoms in themselves or others. Yet again this will require a degree of financial support to facilitate spaces for these workshops to take place in. As well delivering the workshop, funds will enable the ability to print resource packs with interactive sections and useful information to take home. We would also look to cover costs of journey for expert professionals to attend and deliver relevant trauma-based training to our young people.

Extracurricular activities

We aim to deliver a range of enriching youth club programmes such as Swimming Club so they can learn a lifesaving skill; many of the attendees have raised concerns that they were denied the chance to learn to swim in school due to behavioural problems or lack of funding for extracurricular activities and we wish to bridge the gap. This programme will require paid instructors and booking fees of local swimming pools within the local area. We have so many dynamic ideas for programmes for the youth such as self-defence class, anti-knife crime workshops, first aid sessions and so many more. One of the major reasons we cannot carry out most of these programmes/workshops is lack of financial support and/or limitations to accessing discounted rates.

Our Location

Al-Risaalah Youth Club provides a safe and stimulating environment for our young people to flourish. Activities are provided which compliment skills learned in educational environments in a enriching and exciting way.

One of the most important opportunities that Al-Risaalah Youth provides is the opportunity to learn through social interaction, which is an experience most of our young people do not always have due to hostile environments in their backgrounds.

Integration in a large peer group provides the opportunity for genuine friendships to be built, increasing communication skills and well-being by being included and welcomed.

Al-Risaalah Youth members also mentor the younger attendees of our programs and we try and make sure that every member is in charge of mentoring at least one other individual who would then ultimately join the team and mentor others. This builds a sense to wanting to give back to the community and continue the good outreach work.

Volunteering

Since January 2019 we have 20 volunteers who have dedicate their own free time and energy on a weekly basis to ensure our young people could attend the youth club, football sessions and trips. Our volunteers bring a fun, youthful element to our activities, promoting friendship which many of our young people struggle to find after turning away from life on the streets.

Research carried out with our volunteers highlight the positive impact volunteering has on their lives as well as those who they support. Factors such as increased confidence, improved communication skills, value of self-worth, valuable work experience and an increased ability to interact with a range of different people were identified as positive benefits by our volunteers.

Our team of young volunteers are our biggest asset and provide a unique opportunity for our members to receive support they require from their peers. Our members relish in the friendships they develop, whist their parents and carers are confident their child’s needs are being met whist participating in fun and age appropriate activities.

In addition, our in-house youth councillor, Mohamed Habib is always on call to support the youth that come through our institution and offer encouragement, advice and support concerning mental health. We consider this a crucial role as the youth attending our clubs are experiencing adolescence, which can be a very confusing time coupled with the fact that many lack positive male role models in their lives.

The commitment and enthusiasm our volunteers demonstrate whist creating a fun and youthful atmosphere is one of the main reasons for the success of our projects, bringing upwards of a hundred attendees every week.

The reach

Currently we work with wide range of ages encompassing 10-28 from different ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. The attendees travel from all areas of London including North, West and even East London to come to the Al Risaalah Youth programmes. The programmes are always oversubscribed at times with around 50 young people attending on a weekly or bi-monthly basis. We have waiting lists for some our projects due to high demand especially activities during holiday breaks and weekends when youth are usually free.

At the moment we have 150+ members in our mailing list and the communication means are continuously growing. In addition, we have over 700 followers across all the social media platforms across a short period of seven months due to the continuous marketing efforts by Al Risaalah Youth Committee.

Conclusion

This report explored and gave a brief overview into the work done by Al Risaalah Youth. It demonstrates significant improvements towards in the life of the attendees and volunteers in social skills, confidence and interpersonal interactions as well as providing a safe and free space to meet like-minded people and grow. The success of the programmes really has opened the potential for so many more opportunities to be conducted in the foreseeable future.

However, the complete lack of funding has meant that certain programmes cannot be conducted by Al Risaalah Youth due to financial limitations. Therefore, increased funding would improve the outreach work and reach out a wider network of youth.

An increase in funding will also mean that more of Al Risaalah youth can continue for the future, something highly requested from the attendees and committee, evident in the demand and members wanting more projects.

Whilst our volunteers are highly-driven and motivated in their work, without funding, the longevity of our projects will remain at best questionable. And as our team expands and numbers rise (and they both have already), our costs will most definitely exceed our self-generated funds.

The dramatic positive impact our programs are making with the young people has greatly benefit the community and continues to expand and has a lot of potential.

Al Risaalah Youth

Al Risaalah Youth