Every town and city needs strong youth provision and open access youth clubs at its heart – spaces that don’t wait for crisis but create opportunity, connection and consistency. Spaces where young people are supported, heard and valued. Somewhere to go, something to do, and someone to talk to.

Youth centres are not just “nice to have” – they are essential infrastructure for thriving communities. They provide early intervention, informal education, and safeguarding through the simplest but most powerful tools: trust, consistency, and belonging. They save far more than they cost therefore easing pressure on policing, health, and social services.

Yet instead of sustaining and investing in community-based youth work, too much has been replaced by targeted, statistical driven projects. While those projects do still have real value and utilise unrivalled youth workers skills, they largely exist to be reactive and fix problems – not to be genuinely preventative. Through, necessity, we’ve become so obsessed with measurable outcomes that we often forget what can’t be counted in youth work: relationships, self-belief, resilience, belonging and long-term growth. We must have both community based and responsive work hand in hand, at young people’ s benefit.

In a system, that mostly reacts after harm is done, open access youth work is one of the few that’s acts before. Proactive, visible and embedded in communities – meeting young people where they are at, long before they become statistics. These spaces and the youth workers within them form the bedrock every other service relies on – including targeted work.

Youth centres within our communities must be protected, priorities and properly funded – because genuine prevention is not a luxury. Youth Work is about treating young people as individuals. Not as issues to be solves. And when young people have safe spaces, trusted adults, and real opportunities, they don’t just survive – they thrive.