NW entrepreneurs help to secure £20m for new youth clubs

A group of leading North West entrepreneurs, including Bill Holroyd, Ross Warburton, Chris Oglesby and William Lees-Jones, has helped to secure £20m of Big Lottery cash to create four new state-of-the-art youth centres in Manchester, Oldham, Blackburn and Carlisle.

They came together with the NWDA and the voluntary sector to form OnSide last year as an advisory charity to support local partnerships bid for Government 'myplace' funding.

The myplace programme is funded by the Department for Children, Schools and Families, and delivered by the Big Lottery Fund. It allocates grants of between one and five million pounds to support projects that are working to create safe places for young people to get involved in a wide range of activities and get information and advice from people they trust.

Today (4 March 2009), the Big Lottery Fund announced that OnSide has been successful in its bids for new sites in Manchester, Oldham and Blackburn and will allocate £5m to each scheme. A further £5m funding package for a new youth zone in Carlisle was secured last year. The grants will be used as capital funding to build the new centres. Now Onside is aiming to generate the support of regional businesses to help fund the ongoing operational running costs of the sites.

Onside chairman Bill Holroyd said: "OnSide has been successful in securing half of the national myplace funds available for North West projects. This is a major achievement. Now we need the support of businesses in the region to create some of the best facilities for young people anywhere in the UK. All of the new sites will be based on the model of the Bolton Lads and Girls Club which is a national centre of excellence."