HYPE: a model that works

Everyone connected to HYPE, Hestercombe Young People Evolving, will tell you that it was a collaboration from the start, with key people from the community driving it forward, including David Stripp and Kate Welsh. 

Kate is the Assistant Clerk for Community at West Monkton Parish Council. She came to the role with a background in youth work and when Hestercombe Local Community Network started talking about doing something for young people, she was ideally placed to support the eight parishes. 

David also had his own reasons to get involved. He’d helped run a vibrant and well-attended youth club in Kingston St Mary before Covid. When the lockdowns ended, membership shrunk to just three young people. The former members had retreated and whereas pre-pandemic the youth club had hosted welcome sessions for year 6 children moving from primary school to secondary this connection had broken, and now young residents were scattered across different schools and had lost the neighbourhood ties the youth club had previously provided.

And it was clear this was not a problem unique to one parish. With funding of around £8 per young person across the parishes and match funding from SALC (Somerset Association of Local Councils) HYPE looked at how they could tackle the problem. 

First, listen

The first nine months were almost entirely about listening. Surveys went to secondary schools, the three existing youth clubs and were distributed through detached work. Early on they realised if they wanted to get the views of young people, they were going to have to go out to meet them. HYPE brought in Boombox, a mobile youth club built into a truck, run by Creative Outbursts and turned up in parks and public spaces. They collaborated with Somerset Youth Theatre to run workshops with children in primary schools, using drama and creative play to help them say what they needed. What came back was honest and specific to the area.

Twenty-five young people said anxiety about meeting new people stopped them getting involved. Thirty-six needed help with transport. Many had never had any youth provision in their lives. 

David and Kate took what young people told them and built the programme around it.

Making it work on the ground

Funding the model meant persuading eight parish councils, some of which didn’t know how many young people lived in their area, to contribute to a shared pot. The formula was simple and fair, each funded a set amount per young person, per parish.

But saying yes to a budget line is one thing. Making it happen across a shared geography is another. This is where HYPE’s structure mattered. West Monkton Parish Council, with its General Power of Competence, held the grant and managed the finances. Kate coordinated everything including activities, reporting, and funding applications for the project. A steering group met regularly, and parishes actively promoted activities in their own communities.

HYPE co-ordinated experienced partners to deliver the youth support and activities. Youth Unlimited ran detached street work and North Petherton Youth Club, CYP delivered Creech St Michael Youth Club. Kate’s Youth Café at West Monkton grew, shaped by what young people asked for, into a full Youth Club. Creative Outbursts took the Boombox out and about. Somerset Youth Theatre continued working in primary schools, feeding intelligence about the next generation of young people back into the programme.

This wasn’t five Somerset Youth Alliance organisations working in parallel and calling it collaboration. It was five organisations covering different ground, serving shared young people, coordinated from the centre by someone who understood both the community and the practicalities. 

Additionally, HYPE organised and funded new activities at each of the youth clubs based on the young people’s expressed needs: Art Sessions with Go Create; spoken word/RAP sessions with TYCA; and dance sessions with Adosalove, to enhance and form the basis of an ongoing offer to the young people across the LCN, to be sustainable beyond the life of the SALC grant.

HYPE brought diverse communities together. One of the Hestercombe parishes, North Petherton, housed refugee families at the Holiday Inn. With limited community space and opportunities for young people HYPE took the Boombox to them and one of the highlights of the project for David was seeing them taking part and the joy this brought to the young people and their families displaced from their homes. 

The challenges 

David is honest about the moments that tested the model. Persuading councils is slow, painstaking work, and the assumptions some of them brought were challenging: from believing there were no young people who needed support to not wanting to provide services that might be used by young people from outside their parish boundaries. “You have to challenge those assumptions,” David says. “And sometimes you have to do it very carefully, with data, so you can show councillors how investing in young people genuinely benefits their parish.”

What it has built

A year on, every council in the LCN has agreed to continue or increase its contribution. Two successful funding bids from Hinkley Point Community Fund and Awards for All is ensuring the work continues and the collaborations are going further benefiting more young people across Somerset, with conversations with In the Mix, Minehead Eye, Youth Unlimited and others about deeper regional partnerships. “It echoes the aims of the what the Somerset Youth Alliance was set up to achieve.” he says.

And the impact goes beyond the parishes and young people supported. HYPE contracting Creative Outbursts for the Boombox ensured a funding gap that might have seen Creative Outbursts financially at risk was closed, keeping an organisation afloat and provision running in the places that needed it most. 

As the Alliance looks toward Year 4 and the question of legacy, HYPE offers something concrete: a replicable model, tested in practice, with honest learning attached. Ask young people what they need. Fund effective coordination, bring organisations together around a shared geography rather than a shared building, and hold your nerve when there is push back.