Participants on the National Citizen Service [NCS] programme at Preston North End Community and Education Trust have spent their summer helping local care home residents through the Keep Doing Good initiative.
NCS is a government programme for 15 to 17-year-olds which helps young people to develop life skills through a range of residentials, adventurous activities and social action projects – but Coronavirus restrictions meant the programme couldn’t go ahead in its usual format this year.
👕 We have been delivering #NCS tee shirts to our #KeepDoingGood participants today, who have been creating hampers for care home residents from home! 👏
— Preston North End Community and Education Trust (@pnecommunity) August 26, 2020
A great effort by our young people to look out for others in the community. 🤍#PNECET #pnefc pic.twitter.com/Id6omGECnU
Instead, young people were challenged to pledge 16 hours of voluntary work in their community as part of the Keep Doing Good programme.
As part of the Keep Doing Good initiative, NCS participants at Preston North End Community and Education Trust decided to create hampers – similar to the campaign led by the club and the Community and Education Trust earlier this year – for care home residents.
The young people were able to support residents from three Preston care homes by supplying food and activity resources within the hampers.
One participant, Michael Sweetman, was inspired to lend his support during this particular time of need, in response to the Coronavirus pandemic, as part of the NCS programme.
Michael said: “I developed everything in NCS. It’s inspired me since I first started to be a proud and responsible lad.
“I worked on my own programme for the care home, we have been working on hampers for them [residents] to make them stay safe and wear masks at all times. It will keep them healthy and support any type of care they’re in.
“I’m happy and emotional for them [residents] because I want to express my feelings to them and keep them happy.
Community Partnerships Manager Rebecca Robertson explained how the young people had done their bit to support the community as part of the NCS programme, which also included a range of online workshops for those involved over the summer initiative.
“This summer, our NCS programme had to be a little bit different due to the partial lockdown in Preston. We utilised our virtual online skills and we worked with the young people across a virtual platform to deliver different types of activities.
“The young people came up with the idea to make helping hampers, similar to what we did as a football club over the summer programme, but they wanted them to be delivered to the local care homes.
“All the young people collected what they could, they baked brownies, cakes and put them in one big hamper and delivered them to the care homes.”
There were a total of 16 young people who graduated from the NCS Keep Doing Good summer programme from Preston North End Community and Education Trust!
For more information about future waves of the NCS programme and to get involved, please contact the Trust’s NCS Co-ordinator Jess Riley on jessica@pne.com.