A Report on the Work of Café Indie

We may have been a little quiet on here, but that’s in part because we’ve been busy doing the below.
Every so often we write up the work we’ve done – because it really is much more than a Café – so we wanted to share it with yourselves. Please do take a read, and, take some pride too – you helped achieve all this and each success belongs to you, cause you’re a part of us…

The Café has continued delivering high quality interventions to large numbers of young people, providing work experience, training and youth work support that would otherwise not be available, through the delivery of social, cultural and leisure activity. Furthermore, the Café further develops our community through the offer of time, space and support to community groups and development advice for new ideas.
We would like to advise some of the outcomes that have been achieved through this work:

Young People have improved chances in life.
In the last year we worked with 72 young volunteers (aged 16-25), providing a structured programme of work experience, training and youth work support.
A significant proportion of volunteers have high additional needs and we continue to prioritise those young people who have some form of disadvantage. Increasingly our volunteers are drawn from the immediate area, one of the most deprived wards in the area. The Café tries to improve perceptions of young people and of what they can achieve when provided with opportunity and support. All our volunteers have reported an improvement in their employability and well-being as a direct result of the project.
We have greatly developed our relationships with key agencies and are now working closely with Education and the Police’s Early Intervention Team to reach children and young people before negative behaviour is entrenched.  We work with the Job Centre, Children Leaving Care, Young Offenders and various other employability deliverers, ensuring that there are strong pathways into the project and progression routes from it. As a result, young people are more likely to hear of positive opportunities and get access to the support they need.
As a result of this program, young people have improved chances in life, are more likely to find work and sustain employment. Young people learn transferrable skills and their confidence is dramatically improved. Young people have stronger support networks and feel part of a community.  With support services shrinking and the threshold for accessing support getting higher, the Café serves as an early identifier of need and acts as an advocate ensuring more young people get the help they need.
We have, in addition, launched a highly successful drop-in project for children aged 13-18 which delivers youth work and advocacy to over 80 beneficiaries, many of whom are at risk of Criminal or Sexual Exploitation. We work in close partnership with statutory services to deliver early interventions and transform lives and have established ourselves as exceptional at engagement. We are gathering and sharing information that would otherwise be missed. We have also developed a music project to further engage and offer opportunity to young people.
You may have felt the impact of this project. We know that when it first started it became much bigger (and harder to control) than we’d expected. Many of these young people were not ready to access the Café in the manner intended. As such, we’ve made tweaks to the program, altering the times, amending staffing levels and we think we’ve struck the right balance – between delivering this necessary piece of work and maintaining the environment that our lovely customers hold so dear. So – if you were put off at any point, please do try again – the development in these kids in remarkable.

Improved leisure, social and cultural opportunities
We delivered a cultural program of events, that reached audiences of over 4000 people. We have held evenings of theatre, comedy, spoken word, live music, science talks, workshops and art exhibitions. We have brought national and international touring acts to Scunthorpe, at a time when live music venues are closing around the country.  We have not only improved leisure, cultural and social activities for the local community, but we draw in visitors to the town.
We have developed a space dedicated to local musicians, offering tuition and supported rehearsal, recording and performance via our trained Music Worker. This has helped foster a network of young creative people and increased cultural opportunities. We have established a network of organisations across the region, broadening horizons and the opportunities for young people. We are supporting 30 young people around music and are able to work with all abilities. For example, one young man in the Care system and excluded from school comes daily to play the piano and access our youth workers.
The Café hosted over 150 community events in the last year including (but not limited to) support groups on Mental Health, LGBT, Financial Inclusion, Inter-generational activity, Breastfeeding and Medical Issues. These events have been attended by over 3000 unique visitors, accessing support that they may otherwise not have been able to. Local people have improved access to support networks that can benefit them. There is an improved sense of resilience within the community created by the Café. People feel more supported to develop new projects and events, and motivated to address issues in their area.
The Café is the only place that many isolated people go, it is a home for vulnerable groups. Our impact is not simply limited to the individuals we work with. It is a safe place, a White Ribbon venue that hosts LGBT, Mental Health, Female Only support groups and links people to wider communities.
OUR CAPABILITY
This year has also seen the Café raise its profile on a national level – featuring in a series of short documentaries on Newsnight, a short Channel 4 documentary about skills shortages in Britain, a podcast on Community Cafes, developing our work with the nationwide Music Venue Trust and being featured in a national Newspaper.
In addition, we have invested in the staffing capacity of the business side of the project. Applying more focus on the Café business side through the new roles has enabled other existing positions to deliver more on the social side, and more efficiently. For example, Youth Workers are now free to deliver Youth Work, not staff the Cafe. This enables them to work with greater numbers, deliver a higher standard with less time constraints. This has seen an improvement in outcomes, evidenced by the recorded experiences of our volunteers.

In Summary
Café Indie continues to be an innovator – a social project thriving on a failing High Street – bringing culture, community and opportunity whilst delivering an excellent and necessary service to disadvantaged young people. Funding has been critical in the increased capacity and improved delivery of Café Indie, enabling it to deliver more, to a higher standard and make significant progress towards our ultimate aim of a financially independent organisation that delivers ongoing, high social impact. The Café is a critical and valued resource in Scunthorpe – a home for the disadvantaged, a springboard for community activity and a vital cog in the local support systems.

Young People have improved chances in life.
In the last year we worked with 72 young volunteers (aged 16-25), providing a structured programme of work experience, training and youth work support.
A significant proportion of volunteers have high additional needs and we continue to prioritise those young people who have some form of disadvantage. Increasingly our volunteers are drawn from the immediate area, one of the most deprived wards in the area. The Café tries to improve perceptions of young people and of what they can achieve when provided with opportunity and support. All our volunteers have reported an improvement in their employability and well-being as a direct result of the project.
We have greatly developed our relationships with key agencies and are now working closely with Education and the Police’s Early Intervention Team to reach children and young people before negative behaviour is entrenched.  We work with the Job Centre, Children Leaving Care, Young Offenders and various other employability deliverers, ensuring that there are strong pathways into the project and progression routes from it. As a result, young people are more likely to hear of positive opportunities and get access to the support they need.
As a result of this program, young people have improved chances in life, are more likely to find work and sustain employment. Young people learn transferrable skills and their confidence is dramatically improved. Young people have stronger support networks and feel part of a community.  With support services shrinking and the threshold for accessing support getting higher, the Café serves as an early identifier of need and acts as an advocate ensuring more young people get the help they need.
We have, in addition, launched a highly successful drop-in project for children aged 13-18 which delivers youth work and advocacy to over 80 beneficiaries, many of whom are at risk of Criminal or Sexual Exploitation. We work in close partnership with statutory services to deliver early interventions and transform lives and have established ourselves as exceptional at engagement. We are gathering and sharing information that would otherwise be missed. We have also developed a music project to further engage and offer opportunity to young people.
You may have felt the impact of this project. We know that when it first started it became much bigger (and harder to control) than we’d expected. Many of these young people were not ready to access the Café in the manner intended. As such, we’ve made tweaks to the program, altering the times, amending staffing levels and we think we’ve struck the right balance – between delivering this necessary piece of work and maintaining the environment that our lovely customers hold so dear. So – if you were put off at any point, please do try again – the development in these kids in remarkable.

Improved leisure, social and cultural opportunities
We delivered a cultural program of events, that reached audiences of over 4000 people. We have held evenings of theatre, comedy, spoken word, live music, science talks, workshops and art exhibitions. We have brought national and international touring acts to Scunthorpe, at a time when live music venues are closing around the country.  We have not only improved leisure, cultural and social activities for the local community, but we draw in visitors to the town.
We have developed a space dedicated to local musicians, offering tuition and supported rehearsal, recording and performance via our trained Music Worker. This has helped foster a network of young creative people and increased cultural opportunities. We have established a network of organisations across the region, broadening horizons and the opportunities for young people. We are supporting 30 young people around music and are able to work with all abilities. For example, one young man in the Care system and excluded from school comes daily to play the piano and access our youth workers.
The Café hosted over 150 community events in the last year including (but not limited to) support groups on Mental Health, LGBT, Financial Inclusion, Inter-generational activity, Breastfeeding and Medical Issues. These events have been attended by over 3000 unique visitors, accessing support that they may otherwise not have been able to. Local people have improved access to support networks that can benefit them. There is an improved sense of resilience within the community created by the Café. People feel more supported to develop new projects and events, and motivated to address issues in their area.
The Café is the only place that many isolated people go, it is a home for vulnerable groups. Our impact is not simply limited to the individuals we work with. It is a safe place, a White Ribbon venue that hosts LGBT, Mental Health, Female Only support groups and links people to wider communities.
OUR CAPABILITY
This year has also seen the Café raise its profile on a national level – featuring in a series of short documentaries on Newsnight, a short Channel 4 documentary about skills shortages in Britain, a podcast on Community Cafes, developing our work with the nationwide Music Venue Trust and being featured in a national Newspaper.
In addition, we have invested in the staffing capacity of the business side of the project. Applying more focus on the Café business side through the new roles has enabled other existing positions to deliver more on the social side, and more efficiently. For example, Youth Workers are now free to deliver Youth Work, not staff the Cafe. This enables them to work with greater numbers, deliver a higher standard with less time constraints. This has seen an improvement in outcomes, evidenced by the recorded experiences of our volunteers.

In Summary
Café Indie continues to be an innovator – a social project thriving on a failing High Street – bringing culture, community and opportunity whilst delivering an excellent and necessary service to disadvantaged young people. Funding has been critical in the increased capacity and improved delivery of Café Indie, enabling it to deliver more, to a higher standard and make significant progress towards our ultimate aim of a financially independent organisation that delivers ongoing, high social impact. The Café is a critical and valued resource in Scunthorpe – a home for the disadvantaged, a springboard for community activity and a vital cog in the local support systems.

A few years back, our council decided to completely annihilate Youth Services. Almost without exception Youth Centres shut down, the Youth Workers were laid off and the young people left to find their own way in a world that isn’t designed with their needs in mind.
We got quite heavily involved in a campaign to stop that complete balls-up going ahead. A dedicated group of youth workers and young people were fighting, not to save their jobs, but to ensure our young people weren’t forgotten. We knew that cutting Youth centres was a false economy. It might save a little bit at the time, but in the long run anti-social behaviour would rise, aspiration would lower, more kids would fall pregnant, engage in risky behaviour and that, ultimately, all this costs money. Youth Work has always been an under-valued service – even by the statutory services it underpins and supports – but without it things quickly go wrong.

And if you take a look at Scunthorpe Town Centre now, it has large groups of children and young people that appear to be engaged in anti-social behaviour. Children as young as 10 are drinking alcohol on the streets, breaking things, causing trouble. The Emergency and Statutory services are stretched to the limit and struggling to cope. The town feels a different place.
If this were the Daily Mail, right about now we’d be breaking out the capital letters – SOMEONE IS TO BLAME! But at Indie we prefer to do something about it; try and solve the problem.
Let’s just take a minute and state these are not bad kids. Believe us, we’ve met most of them and they’re all ok.
They are not any worse than in your day, whenever that may be. They deal with the same issues – possibly a few more to boot, they still have to transition into adulthood, they still want to question authority, test boundaries and they still like to have fun. Many are still a little unaware of the world and oblivious of people around them, and yeah, some do spit and swear and play music on their phones. They can appear threatening or scary when they gather in large groups. But, many of these young people are dealing with situations you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. Many are the tear-jerking stories that we watch once a year on Comic Relief before going back to our own lives. But, it’s easy to forget they’ve all got their own stories when they’re clogging up the street.
A massive part of the problem is a complete lack of opportunity for them. They’ve got nowhere to go, nothing to do and wherever they do go they get shouted at. There is no place for young people in our community.
They shuffle between a few key spots and end up in bother. And no wonder. Imagine if there was nowhere in town you were welcome, nowhere you could get out of the cold, talk to someone, be treated like a human. Yes, yes, they could always go home, but for some of them that’s worse than having nowhere, and they get more positive reinforcement outside. Scary stuff.
But I say they have nowhere, that’s not really true. Because, they’ve got us.

So, if you hear that there’s lots of kids loitering at the café – bear with us… there should be. And we should be glad about that. We’re working with them because it is necessary. And they’re getting better.
Café Indie will always be a place for everyone, but we are Youth Workers at our core, committed to providing opportunities for young people – that’s why we established in the first place. But sometimes you have to respond to the need, the problems at hand. So, in addition to our work with 16-25 year olds, we decided to develop a project that offered these young people a place to go, that offered them youth work support and opportunity. And this is why you’ll see them in and around the café. In a short space of time we’ve engaged over 80 children and young people, and many of these are the most ‘hard to reach’ (what a load of rubbish that term is), the ones with the most complicated lives. And now, we’re working this group to improve the situation – for them as individuals, for us all as a community.
But, it’s a process. It takes time.
We could just be like the rest of society – move them on, pillar to post, never trying to solve the problem itself, just ‘nimby’ it (like homeless people don’t exist if we move them on and don’t see them, eh?). But that’s not how we do things. We take on the challenge, because if we can integrate these young people into our community then we can make it better. And the benefit of that will be felt for years to come. For us, success isn’t just the positive change in the individuals, it’s all the things that don’t happen – the rapes, assaults, knife crime that we’ve helped prevent. Café Indie is providing a place for young people to go. We’re having an incredible impact at improving the behaviour of these young people. We’re broadening their horizons, their understanding – explaining about all our other work, the various support groups, the importance of the café to so many different groups. But, again – it’s a process and it takes time. Pretty soon, that kid that you saw doing something naughty that time, is going to be doing something positive, making a good choice – serving you coffee, working at a support group for other vulnerable people, working to better him or herself.
So, if you see young people in our café – have some faith in us and have some faith in them.
They are improving. They are learning. They have an amazing amount to give. They’re also generally pretty funny and sweet and kind. For many, the café is the first place that offered them responsibility, opportunity, that believed in their ability to achieve and to be good. And they respect that.
So, please – talk to us about the work, take pride that you spend your money in a place that addresses the issues we face. If they do cause bother, tell us – it could provide a really useful learning opportunity. But don’t give up on us or them because it’s a journey. Do try and talk to them like they’re just normal people, don’t tell them off – we’ll do that. But they’re not scary, they’re not bad people. They’re just kids. And we should all be glad they’ve got a place to go, one that belongs to all of us.
This might end up the most important piece of work we’ve done.

Oh, and we’re not naïve. We are very aware that a lot of others could contribute a whole lot more to this collective aim, we’re just setting out our contribution.