Reopening The Hub

 

It’s Wednesday 14 January, the day after the grand reopening of the new  improved, extended Hub building at LCM’s Bethel Christian Centre on the Becontree Estate, Dagenham (the photos in this article are from the reopening). I’m sitting on the new corner couch and remembering the excitement of the younger Hub lads as they stepped into the building last night for the first time in six months. It’s been hard work for the whole Bethel team, but the building has now been transformed and is looking fantastic! We closed The Hub – our drop-in youth club – last July after an eighteen-month fundraising campaign to raise enough money to extend and double the size of the building. The Hub reaches young people, particularly criminal youth in street gangs from the local area. Evenings are split into two age groups, with an older and younger Hub at different times. The ages of those who come along range from twelve to twenty-four. Started in 1997 by Andrew Hawkins while he was based at Bethel (he’s now an LCM chaplain to the Metropolitan Police), The Hub has gone from strength to strength in its twelve years. It is currently being headed up by myself (as youth worker for The Hub), my husband Julian Haddow (centre manager at Bethel) and the rest of the team here at Bethel – Aaron Clark, Suzy Taylor and our City Vision worker Stephen Christodoulou. The number of individuals on the register of The Hub topped one hundred and fifty last year, and the small, seventy-yearold, converted Sunday school building that had housed it since it began became increasingly tight for space, as well as being in desperate need of repair. The building work started at the beginning of September and was completed just after Christmas. We managed to raise enough funding, mainly through individuals and supporting churches, not only to be able to extend and modernise the building but also to update and improve the interior facilities. We now have two internet work-stations, two fantastic blue and purple pool tables, table football, bubble tubes and even a free jukebox. Next week sees Connexions (the teenage job centre) returning to The Hub to help the young people who come along to find employment, training and housing, as well as helping them return to education. Our Connexions officer Kaz (Karen Livingstone) has worked alongside us for three years now. During this time, with her help, we have been able to offer practical help to a large number of the young people who come along. We often see the result of problems created by social issues in the home lives of many of our young people. Many come from broken homes, with parents missing or in prison. As you can imagine, we have witnessed some shocking situations over the years, including one of our fifteenyear- old girls living in a one-bedroom flat with six other people, and parents throwing their teenage son onto the streets to make an en-suite bathroom out of his bedroom. Many of the lads and girls who come to The Hub are involved in crime, are frequently in and out of trouble with the police, and are often given police tags or spend time in young offenders institutions. We work very closely with the police, especially our Safer Neighbourhoods team which is based on the Becontree ward, working together to reduce antisocial behaviour on the estate. Many of those the police are all-too-familiar with regularly attend The Hub, and the Safer Neighbourhoods team often pops in during a Hub night to play a game of pool, seeking to build a positive relationship between the young people and the law. Aside from working with Connexions and the police, we aim to provide the lads and girls at The Hub with information on all issues that affect them, from sexual health matters to drug awareness and knife crime prevention. We network with many local agencies who help us in making this information easily accessible and up-to-date. The new Hub building was officially opened by the mayor of Barking and Dagenham, Emmanuel Obasohan. During the evening we were joined by many supporters, local press, police and photographers, as well as many young people eager to see what their new Hub looked like. During the opening week we are open every afternoon for supporters to stop by to see how their donations have been used, and open every night to help the young people get back into the routine of coming along. Attendance numbers will no doubt rise as word gets round; we are also expecting to welcome in many new faces. Once life settles down again, we are hoping to continue running our Christianity-Explored-style course for teenagers called the Jesus Course. We have already had a considerable number of our younger teenagers complete the course over the last two years, and it has been great to be able to share with them the gospel message after getting to know them so well over the years and gaining their trust. So often the type of young people we work with in The Hub are labeled by the community and press as being nothing more than faceless criminal youth. Our new manifesto and statement of faith is up clearly on the wall of The Hub for all to see. It states, among other things, that we not only believe in good hot chocolate, and that pool cues are not weapons, but also that teenagers are so much more than just hoodies, and that the God who made them wants to have a relationship with them. We believe that this relationship is the most important one they need to sort out in their lives, and a huge part of the work we do in The Hub is to encourage this. Youth Bibles are always available for reading. Many of the teenagers have never even picked up a Bible before, so hold few or no preconceptions about what it is all about. We also have frequently-changing blackboards on the walls of The Hub with Bible verses written on them. Over the years they have provoked quite a lot of conversations and questions. In the younger Hub we have a five-minute talk/debate on Christianity, and it is this that has led on to many of them wanting to find out more and sign up for a Jesus Course. In the older Hub, which is less structured, we work more on a one-to-one conversational basis. Many of the staff at The Hub have come from backgrounds involved with drug use, and this is often a useful reference point in sharing our testimonies and the way God has worked in our lives to change us. We, of course, believe that if God could change us then he can change anyone! February Update: Numbers coming along are very good, especially in the younger Hub. Many are coming for the first time and are coming from further away – good coverage in the local papers has helped this, and we anticipate that numbers will go up further as old faces return.