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It has been an incredible week for Newry's Crisis Café. Not only have they just moved into fantastic new premises at River House on The Mall in Newry, but tonight their Social Bytes project was announced as one of the winners in the National Lottery UTV Peoples Project, taking away an amazing £69,740.
Run by The National Lottery Community Fund and UTV, The People’s Projects gave the public a unique say in how National Lottery funding should be invested in their local area.
The Peoples Project was looking for imaginative ideas from organisations that had already done good work in their local community, helping people develop the skills and the capacity they need to achieve their ambitions.
Crisis Café was established by social workers Grainne Graham and Louise Quinn as a safe and welcoming place for young people who find themselves in crisis or in need of support. The winners were decided by public vote and some of the Café regulars even went out knocking doors asking people to vote for them. Quinn explains "we were really shocked. Young people struggling with their mental health, yet they had the confidence to go and knock doors."
Describing their project Quinn said "Social bytes was a project that we piloted last year and it was designed by young people, and they identified on the back of COVID that the digital divide was really highlighted when they became very reliant on the internet and devices for their schooling. So we set up the Social Bytes project which was to tackle digital poverty and food poverty.
"We have laptops, Wi Fi, printers, young people can come in and access it and every young person coming to the cafe also gets a hot snack and drink, like a panini or toastie or something like that, while they're also offered mental health support to either the individual, group or peer base support." The project is led by young people and will help them to learn skills, make friends and support each other.
They soon discovered it was their busiest café so they looked into developing that further. "So part of this funding is to set up a digi space upstairs where they'll have a suite of laptops and computers where they can come and do their homework with some literacy and numeracy support as well involved in it." Quinn said.
Crisis Café moved in to their new premises on The Mall last week. The charity covers two floors, with the café space downstairs, and upstairs there's a private counselling one to one room and a group room for group activities.
Explaining how they found out they had won Quinn said "UTV gave us a telephone call on Tuesday to let us know that they were coming to film. They didn't say that we had won but we were hopeful that if they were coming to film we maybe had done well. So they came yesterday afternoon and asked that we would have a group of young people together. The place was full to capacity and the atmosphere was absolutely fantastic when they revealed that we had been one of the winners."
She added "We were delighted to win. We were very shocked. We were unsure because there was five finalists, but have to say young people really are the driving force of everything we do within Crisis Cafe and they really came together over the last two weeks to go out, and campaign, and torture people, and secure the votes that we needed to make sure that we would be one of the winners in the project. We are delighted but actually what it has done is really raise our profile as well with the campaigning, and really gave the young people a sense of purpose. They were so delighted when we found out that we had actually won. It's just such an achievement for them."
The other winning projects in Northern Ireland are Carers Matter by Brain Injury Matters in Belfast which won £69,250 and GROW by Ashes to Gold in Coleraine which won £24,753.
In addition, The Empathy Tent by Parenting NI in Derry/Londonderry and The UP! Programme by Replay Theatre Company in Belfast were voted runners-up, walking away with £10,000 each for their projects thanks to National Lottery players.
Paul Sweeney, The National Lottery Community Fund’s NI Chair, said: “The People’s Projects highlights the incredible work of inspiring community groups across Northern Ireland. I want to take the opportunity to congratulate this year’s winners on behalf of everyone at The National Lottery Community Fund.”
The groups were among 95 worthwhile projects across the UK in the running to share over £4 million in National Lottery funding as part of this year’s The People’s Projects. Visit www.thepeoplesprojects.org.uk to see a full list of winning projects across the UK.
The National Lottery Community Fund, the largest funder of community activity in the UK, distributes money raised by National Lottery players, who raise over £30 million each week across the UK for good causes. To find out more visit www.TNLCommunityFund.org.uk
