Youth Club Participation

Yarnscombe’s very own website has been up and running since the beginning of 2007. The site is meant to represent views of everybody living in the parish and after being approached by Richard and Lyn the children and young people who attend our club were keen to be involved.

At this point the committee of Yarnscombe Youth Club thought it prudent to seek professional and legal advice. The internet is nowadays part and parcel of the daily life of most children/ young people and the committee is fully aware of the many positive aspects of such technology.

But as an organisation, our foremost goal is to provide a safe place for all members and to do our best to protect them from all possible harm. Therefore, we feel that the committee of Yarnscombe Youth Club cannot be expected to shoulder the responsibility of possible consequences if our members post text and/or pictures on the website. After being told (by David Jago, who is happy to talk to anybody who wants more information) how easy it is to edit the most innocent of pictures and/or text and have them accessed by people who represent a threat to the well-being of children, we think it is our duty to put the welfare of our members first and limit the club’s involvement with the website to text-only contributions that do not identify individual children. This might sound excessive and over the top, but we are a small organisation run entirely by volunteers and apart from a duty of care towards our members we also need to protect ourselves.

However, this does not mean that the young people of Yarnscombe can’t get involved with the website. All it means is that their involvement would be on a purely individual basis and the onus of responsibility regarding their protection from harm would lie with the respective parent/carer. Also, Pete Gallagher who has been helping out at Youth Club over the last few months and whose enthusiasm is commendable, offered to help the children/young people if they would like to get involved. We would like to point out though, that Pete is doing this as an individual and not in his capacity as helper at Youth Club.

Finally, as you might remember, we received a substantial grant at the beginning of February and amongst other things, we purchased a digital camera. We are hoping to put any pictures and videos that were taken during Youth Club on discs and parents/carers would be able to purchase these discs from Youth Club.