By Shelby Furzer
JERSEY’S youth clubs have been around for what feels like forever for people my age. They are a space in which to relax and be entertained, or somewhere to vent and get advice from adults who aren’t parents but are friendly and supportive.
There has been much political discussion about budgets for youth clubs, and in the proposed 2025 budget, the government allocated £226 million to Children, Families, Education and Lifelong Learning.
I think that the Island’s youth clubs have seen better days, but their physical condition was never a big issue. For me, it has always been a social place: they have always been places where me and my friends could go to talk to and get advice from an older person.
This allowed us to have the personal freedom to ask away, with questions that wouldn’t be answered within the home without just leading to further questioning.
I went to the La Pouquelaye Youth Club in Years 7 and 8. The club had things like TVs and games and DVDs, but also had an area for baking and playing football.
I spent most of my time helping to run the tuck shop, and I think this is a perfect example of how youth clubs are all about positive experiences. I learnt about money and how to manage it. I got a feeling for just how much effort goes into the jobs of everyday retail workers. The experience gave me a different perspective on how I saw people working in shops and taught me a thing or two about the job.
The most popular place within the youth club was always the lounge area, which was filled with games and toys, but it seemed that every night we would just all end up sitting around chatting.
Youth clubs offered that experience of being allowed to stay out late with your mates under supervision that wasn’t your parents’, which made it seem so different and special. This is what makes Jersey’s youth clubs so important – and unique.
The thing that most children will remember is the youth workers, how they were treated within the youth club and what standards these role models set for them.
This is why I personally think that the government should look more into the wages of youth workers and the process it takes to become one. From living in Jersey, I sometimes bump into the old youth workers who used to run the projects I got involved with, and I think that this proves the lack of people wanting to become youth workers nowadays. I think that there needs to be more positivity surrounding the youth workers too, explaining how amazing a job it is, and how much you genuinely will impact the lives of children.
Being a youth worker is such an influential job. Youth workers all over the Island have changed so many different children’s lives without even knowing it. I think that youth clubs are definitely targeting the “tween” years, providing a really popular and interactive place for them to go, but I think that they could definitely work a bit harder on targeting older and younger people.
Overall, I think that Jersey’s youth clubs should definitely be here to stay. I have some great memories from my times at youth clubs and I learnt some very valuable life lessons.
Without the youth clubs, I think parents would find it much harder to offer their children social interaction with their peers outside of school because there just isn’t any entertainment anymore for children.
Jersey’s night life is already dying, with Havana and Rojos shutting their doors for good, but this doesn’t mean that we also must impact children by losing all the entertainment offered for them.
I hope that youth clubs are still around when I have children because I think they are just such an influential experience. So yes, they definitely need to carry on being funded, and their funding needs to go up with the rising cost of living so that the youth clubs can stay at the high standard they already have and keep changing children’s lives.
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Shelby Furzer is a 17-year-old student studying for her A-levels at Hautlieu.
