Waterside’s Wonderful Summer!

1 September 2022

When you think of summer, the things that come to mind are warm weather, sunshine and getting outdoors. For Waterside Centre that has absolutely been the case and it has been another term of fantastic opportunities for young people, the community and for Berkshire Youth to develop its partnerships.

The sunshine and warmer weather brought an exciting start to the summer holidays and the activities programmes we have been offering from Waterside. With some funding through the Holiday, Activities and Food (HAF) scheme, we have been able to offer primary school aged children the opportunity to join us for breakfast followed by activities for a nominal cost. In addition to HAF funding, we also received some grant funding from Sovereign Housing, Greenham Trust and other local trust funds enabling us to offer our programme for secondary school aged young people for free (including dinner). Activities have included: multi-sports, team challenges, themed-activities, boxing, paddling, climbing, T-shirt printing, bird box designing, egg-drop parachutes and paper boat races. Food for the programmes was provided on-site through the café and Colline’s Kitchen team; the top pick for breakfast was pancakes with fruit, and the favourites for dinner were chicken curry, sausages and mash and chili con carne.

On top of the HAF programmes, we have also been able to provide climbing, paddling and boxing workshops to both primary and secondary age groups in partnership with our local partners Cloud 9 Pursuits, Thames Valley Boxing Club, Sport in Mind, Berkshire Printmakers and BoxWise.  

Whilst we are still collating the full data report for the complete summer programme activities, we can estimate that during the summer we have had over 350 attendances on the primary programme and over 400 attendances on the secondary programme.

The summer has also seen more opportunities for our young people to take part in work experience, work shadowing and volunteering opportunities across Waterside Centre programmes and wider community projects.

Overall, Waterside Centre has seen over 5,000 attendances at programmes and activities, May to August.