POLICE Commissioner Andy Dunbobbin visited Kinmel Bay to see how money recovered through the Proceeds of Crime Act is helping young people in the area.
Mr Dunbobbin visited the Kinmel Bay Youth Shed to meet the team behind the Youth Shedz initiative, which has established eight projects across North Wales and has around 120 young people involved in some way.
Their operations include a virtual reality space and the mobile outreach van Betsi, but they wished to connect them all to work together more closely.
Kinmel Bay Youth Shed received £5,000 of funding through the Your Community, Your Choice to help pay for a coordinator on the ‘County Lines 4 Good’ initiative.
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The Your Community, Your Choice initiative, also supported by the North Wales Police and Community Trust (PACT) and North Wales Police, is in its ninth year.
During this time, more than £400,000 has been handed out to deserving causes and much of it has been recovered through the Proceeds of Crime Act, using money seized from offenders, with the rest coming from the Police and Crime Commissioner.
Youth Shedz has also developed links with the Teardrops charity in St Helens (a long-established charity that already works with the homeless community) and young people from North Wales have been over the border several times to link in with the work the charity does around gangs and knife crime in Merseyside.
Many of the young people that both organisations work with have either lived experience of County Lines or are highly vulnerable to being manipulated into being involved at street level. The funding from Your Community, Your Choice is being used to provide the resources to connect the Youth Shedderz from Denbighshire, Conwy and Gwynedd with the young people from Teardrops in St Helens so that they can work together to work on this project and develop a young person’s response to County Lines.
Constable Alan Landrum of Merseyside Police Community Engagement Unit and Sergeant Azizur Rahman from Merseyside Police also joined the visit, alongside PC Glyn Edwards and PCSO Kerri-Lea Adams of North Wales Police.
Andy Dunbobbin, Police and Crime Commissioner for North Wales, commented: “I am delighted to support the ‘County Lines 4 Good’ initiative through the Your Community, Your Choice fund.
“Supporting and protecting children and young people and diverting them away from the Criminal Justice System is a key priority of my plan to cut crime in North Wales and this project from Youth Shedz is a great example of this work in operation.
“Just as ‘County Lines 4 Good’ seeks to turn the scourge of County Lines into a positive way of developing networks between groups of young people in different towns, the Your Community, Your Choice fund does a similar job by taking the proceeds of criminal activity and using them for the good of the wider community. It’s a form of justice in action.”
Scott Jenkinson, founder of Youth Shedz, said: “We are grateful for the support our project has received from the Your Community, Your Choice fund.
“Young people from a large city have a lot of experience and wisdom that they can share with youngsters in North Wales.
“The hope is that by bringing these two groups of youngsters together each will be able to work together, to learn from each other, share insights and create something that will raise awareness of County Lines from both their perspectives.
“At Youth Shedz, we’ve found that young people understand the difficulties that their community has to deal with and that they want to be a part of the solution.”
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