Funding agreement helps safeguard Winterbourne youth centre (From Gazette Series)
Get involved: send your pictures, video, news and views by texting GS NEWS to 80360, or email
us
Funding pledge for Fromeside Youth Centre after South Gloucestershire Council's £1million cutbacks
9:00am Sunday 3rd March 2013 in News By Alexandra Womack
VITAL funding has been agreed to help keep a Winterbourne youth centre open.
A share of £41,000 will be given to Fromeside Youth Centre, on Watley’s End Road, to try and safeguard its future following widespead council cutbacks announced last year.
The money will be split between the Winterbourne centre and two others in Filton and Little Stoke.
Fromeside, which opens on Monday and Friday evenings and during the day on Wednesdays for a school inclusion project, was one of numerous across the district to be put under threat in 2012 when South Gloucestershire Council relinquished control of seven of its 13 youth centres to make savings of up to £1million.
The authority said it would only continue to fund the six centres in its designated priority neighbourhoods, including one in Yate.
But last week the Southern Brooks area forum, which has a budget to assist groups in the Winterbourne area, agreed to pay the South Gloucestershire Youth Initiative £11,250 a year for three years to provide two sessions per week at Fromeside Youth Centre. The funding is part of an agreed 75:25 split with the Frome Vale area forum.
Winterbourne Conservative councillors Tim Bowles and John Godwin said the money would go some way to protect the centre and its well-used facilities.
"The indoor skate park facilities that Fromeside Youth Centre houses are unique in the local area, which is why it would be travesty if local youngsters were to lose it," they said.
"Because of the centre’s proximity to Frampton Cotterell and Coalpit Heath, we now hope to get the remaining funding from the Frome Vale area committee which will help secure the centre’s future."
The Frome Vale forum meets tonight (Thursday, March 7 7pm) at Shire Way Community Centre in Yate. The committee, which has £79,096 available to give groups in the Yate and Chipping Sodbury area, will also consider funding Chipping Sodbury Youth Centre and Wickwar Youth Centre which are also under threat due to the cutbacks.
