221005 MArys D&AStatement - Flipbook - Page 5
Mary’s
Our Work
Mary’s director of Youthwork, Jason Allen, set up
Mary’s 15 years ago, when he was 19, to help people
like him who hadn’t been supported by social services.
Jason was awarded a BEM for services to children in
the 2021 New Year Honours.
Mary’s mentors over 250 young people a year within
our Core Program and supports a further 1000 young
people through groupwork, mental health work and
activities. We work in schools, pupil referral units,
housing estates and prisons. Our recent data shows
that 73% of the young people we serve have
experienced Adverse Childhood Events and 74% of the
young people we work with have been able to stay in
education.
We are proud to host the only knife amnesty bin in
Camden, which stands just outside our church. 413
knives were surrendered in the year to February 2021.
Of 300 grantees under the Young Londoners Fund, we
are one of a handful to be funded directly by the
Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, working in
concert with the Mayor’s Violence Reduction Unit.
In 2020/21, Mary’s mentored 298 young people. Our
inclusion criteria for a young person entering our Core
Program are that they are between the ages of 12-18
and at risk of school exclusion, at risk of violence, or at
risk of involvement in the criminal justice system. Our
mentoring aims to improve a young person’s ability to
cope and therefore develop themselves. Our work has
the outcomes of building emotional skills and life skills
which increase a young person’s ability to stay in
education, re-enter learning or otherwise fulfil their
potential.
Mary’s is a Foundation Partner for the Marcus Rashford
life skills program for young people, Thrive. Mary’s is
recognised as a national leader in youth violence
knowledge and is working with the National Youth
Agency on course development. We are grantees of the
National Lottery for our safety work.
It is Mary’s belief that a foundation for successful
mentoring is to face head-on the realities of the safety
concerns of gang violence, control by others and
Mary’s, Primrose Hill
constraints that exist. Mary’s intervened in 52 incidents
in the year 2021/21 which required mediation, of which
20 involved a risk to life. We undertook 29 prison visits.
The challenges we face are stark: 15 individual young
people who were mentees in our youth violence
programme have died. But we are dedicated to our
young people and work to keep them safe. We are the
only charity to operate an on-call model for mentees all
days of the year.
Young people at Mary’s, alongside the knife amnesty bin
Our Space
St Mary’s is the home and centre of our intensive
one-to-one mentoring. Our church is an extremely rare
and valuable kind of space, because it is a neutral safe
space in a borough dominated by gang territory.
Currently, however, we compete for space within the
busy church building. We frequently have to adapt and
make do with whatever is available at the last minute.
Sensitive counselling takes place seated in a pew,
speaking in low voices so as not to be overheard.
Evening sport moves between the hall and the nave to
make space for a booked event. The size of the kitchen
limits the size of our cooking sessions. The staff and
youthworkers are squeezed into a tiny office with no
space for team meetings.
This proposal will un-cap current levels of operation
with dedicated spaces for our work. The 1:1 mentoring
room will provide a safe and private space for
counselling.
The multipurpose space will provide us with a space
for groups of up to 6 young people in group mentoring,
or class mental health programmes where two
youthworkers lead a 30-person class. We can also use
this space for small group training to share skills,
promote the third sector and statutory sector
competencies and knowledge for this vulnerable group
of young people.
Finally, the new office will provide our staff with a
proper place to work and to welcome young people.
Our Growing Vision
Over the past few years our youthwork provision has
increased substantially in response to a rise in referrals
from secondary schools, referrals from work on the
streets, and from youth offending. The backdrop to this
is an increase in young people’s mental health issues,
financial hardship, knife-crime, large reductions in
youth provision (see London’s Lost Youth Services
annual report) and increasing strength of crime groups.
We anticipate that the trend of increased referrals will
continue in coming years. Our team has 4 full time and
9 part time staff.
This growth means we are now in urgent need of
increased space for youth workers, meeting rooms,
and therapy space in which we can undertake to host
highly sensitive mentoring, group courses, and school
support for young people.
Many benefits will accrue from increasing the space:
the reach of the charity’s work will increase to more
young people allowing us to take all urgent referrals.
The building would allow for training of other
youthworkers and those working with young people on
the Mary’s Courses which we have developed. The
workforce development that Mary’s pioneers will
impact on the youthwork sector. Our team would able
to carry out more gang mediations, obviating risks of
injury and death; more still would be given access to
safe spaces; meetings would be more effective and
shorter, thus freeing more staff time; administration
and data management would be improved.
Ultimately, more young people will be taken out of
environments in which they can be drawn into crime,
violence and other anti-social behaviours.
Our Governance
The Trustees of Mary’s are responsible for overseeing
Mary’s operations and administration.
There are close links between the parish and the
charity. Three of the charity trustees are from the
congregation and the Vicar of the church is a
permanent appointee to the charity’s board of trustees.
This proposed building is responding to need in the
local area, demonstrable in the volume of individuals
and organisations asking for our services and the
funding they attract. A pronounced and critical need
for vulnerable young people exists. We are the
specialist service for the area and an important
component of local safety. Having this building, which
has been carefully designed for our needs, in
consultation with the church, will transform the service
we are able to deliver.
Mary Jane Roberts CEO, Mary’s
Dow Jones Architects