FOLLOWING on from their success in 2021 when they picked up the Aisling Award for Community Endeavour, the past 12 months have been a phenomenal time for the Lagmore Youth Project.

From humble beginnings at the start of the pandemic, the initiative has grown to support the young people of the Lagmore area from several sites within the district.

Colm Fanning from the project says the highlights of the year have been the delivery of the Urban Villages programme over two new locations. The work on the ground, he say, has also been a huge success.

“We have increased the number of opportunities for our young people of all ages and have a huge outreach across all of Lagmore," he said. "I look back on the last year and I think of our Friday evenings where we have provision for our P4 students, our junior provision and our secondary school age provision alongside our football and outreach.

“On a Friday alone, our phenomenal team are working with over 250 young people and that has to be the highlight for us.”

The project had to suspend their on-street provision due to a lack of funding from the Education Authority, but there are hopes that it will return next year with additional sessions.

“The Education Authority cuts are not only impacting ourselves, but across West Belfast there has been a loss of over half a million pounds for youth provision and that will have a major impact. But we are trying to reduce that as much as possible as youth providers, but we are facing limitations on what we can provide under the current funding structure.”

Colm is looking forward to next year and that the project is continuing to explore new opportunities to engage with young people.

As a team we have been blown away by the fact that we are now an award-winning youth organisation. Sometimes we forget that we are only in operation two years and to win major awards including the Aisling Award and Belfast Pride award is down to the staff and volunteers who give so much of themselves and work hard with our young people and parents."

Looking ahead to the next 12 months, Colm told us they have been working with several government departments to progress their plans for a purpose-built youth centre in the area.

“The current cost of living crisis and the lack of an Assembly will have a major impact on the delivery of that project. We recognise that this is a temporary measure that we are operating and medium to long term we need a facility that suits our needs.

“At the moment we are operating across four sites which is making a huge impact, but we know that if we had a more sustainable building then we could be having an unbelievable impact on the community.

“We are limited in the number of people we can work with and are finding some nights we are having to turn away double the number of young people due to a lack of staff and the size of the site we are operating from.

“We recognise that that is not good enough, so we want to be able to open our doors and let anyone who wants to access our services. To do that, we need a purpose-built centre so that the young people can come here when they want to as opposed to wondering if they can get in on a particular night.”



Colm told us that one of the major projects they launched this year involved working with the parents of LGBTQIA+ young people.

“That programme was a huge success and the parents involved have been calling for more opportunities to engage with our services and we are hoping to be able to offer that out to other parents over the next 12 months,” he added.