Richard Luscombe Argyle Community Trust’s Community Engagement team is proud to launch Kicks Town – our newly restructured five tier model for targeted youth engagement in Plymouth and beyond.
Kicks Town aims to reduce crime and anti-social behaviour, whilst supporting young people’s personal development and encouraging them to participate in training and qualifications. The programme is supported by key partners: Devon and Cornwall Police, Plymouth City Council’s Youth Justice Service and Youth Work teams, and the Premier League’s Charitable Fund. It is also being supported with funding from the Safer Streets 4 fund, headed by Plymouth University.
The programme comprises estate-based sport, education, and mentoring, using the power of football and the value of sports participation to help young people in some of the city’s most high-need areas.
The Trust have provided targeted community engagement sessions for decades through national and local funding such as Premier League Kicks and Premier League Kicks Targeted – Breaking the Cycle. The Kicks Town model will focus on five key tiers:
Tier one will see the development of our staff force, and welcoming fellow trusted sport-for-change organisations to collaborate with us on key deliverables. We have developed a training matrix that means every member of staff across our Kicks Town programmes that is required to deliver sessions is upskilled in multi-sports coaching, youth work, mentoring, conflict resolution, first aid, safeguarding, risk management, and regional policing objectives. This will ensure that staff are trained to the required level to suit the tier in which they will operate.
Tier two is our core Premier League Kicks provision, providing weekly community sports sessions in over nine targeted areas of Plymouth. Our coaches work in partnership with youth workers and local police community support officers to develop a safe space for young people aged 8-18 to play sports. Once young people are established within the sessions, we use existing youth centre venues to host workshops on topics such as developing positive relationships, sexual consent, drug networks and county lines exploitation.
Kicks sessions aim to steer young and potentially vulnerable people away from negative pathways and encourage them to become immersed in positive avenues such as education and long-term employment through our Charity and with our extensive list of partners.
Tier three is our bespoke mentoring programme – Breaking the Cycle. The programme offers consistent mentoring, guided learning, and life coaching to 11- to 16-year-olds in Plymouth who are at risk of entering the criminal justice system. Each of our mentees is referred into the programme by the Child Centred team at Devon and Cornwall Police. Once their entry to the programme is confirmed, our Targeted Youth Mentors will work closely with a mentee and their family to introduce a long-term plan for their development.
The programme has been successful in steering young people away from crime and has developed relationships with several city businesses to provide positive exit routes for the young people.
The next steps involve the Trust attaining future funding to sustain the existing model and increase the reach and power of the project by working with more targeted and hard-to-reach young people at Tiers four and five.
Tier four will have a stronger focus on intervention, working with young people aged 11 to 18 in the city to prevent them getting into crime in the first place. This will involve a referral only mentoring programme for those identified as being affected by one of the city’s key police objectives – sexual exploitation, violence against women and girls, domestic violence, and dangerous drugs networks.
Tier five will focus explicitly on targeting early intervention models with young people aged 8 to 14 who have been highlighted by authorities as having been involved in exploitation through drugs.
Head of Community Engagement Dan Hart said “The work we do in the community is vital and often changes the life path of the young people we work with. Using the power of sport, and the brand of Plymouth Argyle, our expert staff act as role models for these young people, and we can connect with them in ways that may not have otherwise been possible.
“During the 2021/22 season we engaged with over 1,000 young people through our Premier League Kicks project alone, providing over 30,000 hours of positive, and potentially life changing avenues for young people.”
To demonstrate the importance of this work, the Argyle Community Trust 2021/22 Impact Report found that in Plymouth, the rates of cautioned and court sentenced children and proven offences committed by children are the second highest in the South West, and only 20% of surveyed residents were involved in their local community area, with younger residents the least engaged.
To find out more about our Kicks Town model, or our community engagement work, contact Head of Community Engagement, Daniel.Hart@pafc.co.uk.
