Coventry ESCAPE gives hope to young people
A new youth club called ‘ESCAPE’, has opened in the Tile Hill area of Coventry. It’s the third local program created by Guiding Young Minds (GYM) to create a safe space for teenagers.
Picture credit: Guiding Young Minds
GYM is a confidential intervention service which has received funding from Costco and West Midlands Police to open this latest youth club.
Based in the heart of Tile Hill, it is aimed to attract teenagers in the nearby area. Because of its central location it also hopes to cut down on transport costs. Anton Noble, the Senior Lead for GYM said: “the area has gang culture in it and a lot of anti-social behaviour.”
ESCAPE focuses on team building but offers other activities such as hair and beauty training, football and boxing. Young people that attend can also get help with their homework and advice about their education.
GYM specialises in working with those dealing with trauma, so it also offers access to mentors and therapy.
Anton said, “We want to slow down the growth of anti-social behaviour and gang culture for young people” and added, “Now we have a youth group in the area, it gives them the opportunity to be around people who want to do positive stuff.”
ESCAPE is the latest of GYM’s community launches in Coventry and they plan to open five clubs, in total, in the near future.
GYM was started in Northamptonshire to help vulnerable children and young people achieve their goals. Anton told CovFeed, “A lot of services saw people who were involved in violence and gangs as perpetrators, but they never saw them as victims.”
“There wasn’t really any support in Coventry or Northamptonshire for young people involved in these things. There was only really prison or the youth offending service and those are for when you’ve gone too far and have to serve a punishment. There wasn’t really any intervention before that happened.”
ESCAPE will be open every Tuesday from 6 until 7:30pm at Coventry North Seventh-Day Adventist Church, and is funded to run until March 2023.