Hello and Welcome to Connect Alloa’s first blog post! This is a feature which we hope to add to on at least a monthly basis, giving you a run down of what’s been happening, what we have coming up and how you can get involved.

This month’s post is brought to you by me (Dave Crozier, Director of Connect Alloa) but my hope is that other team members and young people will give you updates too.

By the time this blog goes live, we will have been working directly with young people for 7 months and in that time, I feel we have made amazing steps towards making sure the youth groups are developing at the right pace and incorporating what the young people see as priorities.

We are now a well-known name in the community and have built up strong links with other organisations and the local press and all the while, none of us are paid employees – simply dedicated volunteers.

We have a strong team of weekly volunteers as well as a trustee team and the young people also seem to enjoy the fact that the club is ‘theirs’. Something they have ownership of and therefore make decisions about, fundraise for and talk openly to the staff about what they enjoy and what could be better.

That is one of the main things I hope to get out of every person involved in Connect Alloa; honesty.
Without knowing what isn’t working, we can’t make things better. We need to know positives and negatives and understand that we might not see something that a young person does and that’s okay. We are all on the same page and trying to make improvements so as much as we are doing right, we also need to be aware of where we can improve.

What I feel we have had our biggest success though is in my goal of being an open space that accepts young people as they are. All staff and young people are accepting each other and are willing to share experiences, support one another and celebrate differences too.

I have always envisioned Connect being a place where people could come together no matter who they were. Who you are from the day you join us and from that point on is what matters to me and that message trickles down through the team and to the young people, allowing us to be a place that just accepts you for you.

If you would  like to start attending groups, please just drop on by.
if you would like to chat about volunteering opportunities, please contact dave@connectalloa.org.uk

If you would like to keep up to date with what’s going on at Connect Alloa, find us on Snap Chat, Instagram, Twitter & Facebook!

Until next time, have a very Merry Christmas and an Awesome New Year.

Dave & The Connect Team