Building Bridges is a project for 14-25 year olds with additional needs.

The project is based within Bridges Community Centre in Monmouth, but is a countywide project. Monmouthshire is split into three main areas with a project focus in each area; Monmouth, Abergavenny and Caldicot and Chepstow.

Our aim is to support and encourage young people to engage in their local communities; broadening their social networks, making friends, confidence building and learning social skills. Our focus is on sustainability and supporting our young people to make connections with individuals and groups that outlive the life of our project. We do this through one-to-one and group work encompassing social, leisure and work related activities.

We are currently a BIG Lottery funded project, but unfortunately our funding comes to an end in October of this year. This will have a devastating effect on the young people and families that we work with, as we have worked hard to build up relationships with them and other agencies, and are still working hard to achieve the goals they have identified. From the feedback we have received from the beneficiaries, our project has been described as ‘life changing’. This is obviously gives us an enormous boost and highlights the importance of the work we do.

Sadly, the Big Lottery refuse to fund the same project twice, which is frustrating since we have proven its success by the level of need that exists in Monmouthshire for the services we offer. We have been overrun with referrals since we started up in 2013, and have tried our best to work with as many people as possible up to date, but there is still much to do.

The project has running costs of around £180k each year to employ 3 full time Project Coordinators and a full time Manager. So we are going to have to work hard to raise enough funds to sustain this for any length of time after October.