Community Action Through Sport (CATS)

This project is being led by WAP and Wells Safer Neighbourhood Team but involves many other partners such as Victory Housing, Alderman Peel High School, youth and sports clubs and young people. The aim of CATS is to promote and reward young people for their positive community work by awarding them a sports based activity. Members of the community can nominate any young person for an awards if they believe they have positively contributed to the town. It's aimed at:

• Young people at risk of offending
• Good kids already doing their bit in the community
• Young people who have already offended and need re-direction
• Disabled young people
• Young people aged from 5 - 19 yrs

Specific activities will be:

• Community identifies a suitable project for young people to participate in e.g. painting the village hall or running a community garden
• Police and PCSO’s work with a targeted group of young people (those at risk of offending or those needing re-direction) to carry out the community project.
• Members of the community nominate the young people they think deserve an award.
• Sport activities are donated by local sports centres/gyms
• Young people receive a sports based award e.g free swim pass, gym session, football coaching
• Hold a formal award ceremony and invite the whole community

PROGRESS SO FAR..................

WAP WON!!

At the recent EDP pride of norfolk competition, not only did Wells came runner up for the award based on its size, but Wells won the Women's institute award for forward to the future for the work completed by WAP with the young people. To then add icing to the cake WAP were awarded a special commendation for their work, a huge achievement to all who were or are involved. Two young people from the Walsingham group attended the award ceremony with myself, PCSO Becky Taylor and Joyce Trout. The two awards will be on display, one in the WAP office and one at the school.

As if that was not enough WAP have just found out that they were also the regional runner up in the 2010 Philip Lawrence Awards and that we will be presented with a certificate as will the young people involved. CATS is really pushing the boundaries locally and giving these young people national recognition, three new technology events will be advertised soon in Wells, Walsingham and Blakeney so keep an eye out!

The CATS project is steaming on. Having secured £6000 worth of funding from Norfolk County Council's Your Norfolk, Your Decision fund and Wells Safer Neighbourhood Team, we then went on to find out what our local young people thought of the project. Luckily the project met with a great response from the young people, and many of them signed up to be part of the CATS committee. Young people have now completed the first two community projects. On 10th May a group of young people in Waslingham held a charity football match and raised £300 for Help for Hero’s (see Walsingham Youth project for more information ). Not to be out done, a small group of young people form Alderman Peel High School in Wells got together to clear up the Railway Cutting at East Quay. This area has long been identified by the community as a mess and no one quite knows whose responsibility it is to keep it clean. So the young people got their gloves on and litter pickers out and cleared away 12 sacks of rubbish.  

Although we approached the CATS committee with some projects that the community had put forward, the committee felt that there was already an Eco team within the school who should deal with the recycling project.
In January 2010, two new projects have been presented for the CATS committee, one being the evolved Street Cats around Coastal rowing and the other is the Technology session in the library.  An assembly took place to allow the CATS committee to present to the Year 7 group and try and get some new recruits, this was not overly successful, so we plan to try and reach these groups in their community lessons.  There will be a meeting shortly with the CATS programme to start the technology sessions.