Help Us Banish Lockdown Boredom!

Update 05/05: Wow. We Feel 100% blessed, encouraged and supported. We have reached our target for getting Play Packs out to 60 Families in St Pauls (through Full Circle, Talo and Cognitive Paths). We've had so much support (over 50 donations), we're going to stretch our target to try and raise £600 more. The play packs have been heading our to our youngers group (8-11 year olds) but we have about 40 older young people (12-16) in our membership who are also needing support. We're creating slightly more appropriate play packs for them, with arts materials but also things like boardgames, cards etc. This request has come as direct feedback from our membership so thank you all who have been in touch.

So if you haven't had the chance to donate and want to, please do. Your generosity is greatly appreciated.

We need your help to provide 60 families in St Pauls, with creative play packs to help keep our young people offline, creatively engaged and occupied in what has been the longest rainy day indoors in living memory.

Beyond food and medicine, staving off boredom is one of the lockdowns biggest challenges.

We've teamed up with The Scrapstore, Bristol who are offering incredible play packs that include all kinds of creative tools, games and exercises. They're offering us 20 packs for free but we're aiming to raise the money to get another 60 packs and need your help to raise the funds. We'll be distributing these through Cognitive Paths, Talo and Full Circle who all work with Families in St Pauls.

Each pack costs £12.57 and in addition to materials and exercise, will also add additional tools such as Glue, Scissors etc. that some families may not have access to. If we manage to raise more than our total, then we can reach even more families. So whether it's pounds or pence, every little helps!

With homeschooling, socialising, entertainment all taking place online and very little opportunity to get outside each day, having the opportunity to do something fun and creative will be an absolute lifeline to some households.

If you have any questions, have any needs that aren't being fulfilled by other services or run a service that you think we can help support, please get in contact at admin@fullcircleproject.org.uk

A Bit about Full Circle

Full Circle has been providing youth and family services to St Pauls for over 40 years. Formed as a response to the racial profiling and political uprisings in the 1980s, Full Circles aim was to create social, creative and physical acitivies and increase the positive opportunities and role models for the young people in the area. Starting by hiring a minibus and getting the kids off the streets and off to places like weston-super-mare each summer, Full Circle has become an key youth service in Bristol.

Since 2013, when key funding for youth services was cut, Full Circle has been finding unique and ambitious ways to keep its service alive and thriving. Since 2015, it took on the management and lease of the St Pauls Settlement (Now Docklands Youth and Community Centre), built a nursery (Raised in St Pauls), refurbished its offices and got in some incredible new community organisations and been doing its absolute best to keep the doors open and build a sustainable community service. Covid-19 has hit it hard, with most of the income stopping as of March.

What are we doing in response to the crisis?

As with most organisations and people alike, we've had to adjust pretty quickly to a new way of doing things. All our Docklands operational staff have been furloughed, apart from our admin staff who is keeping the organisation operational.

Our wonderful Trustees have all got themselves online and are managing all the important decisions remotely from isolation.

From this two of our trustees are leading on keeping the most at risk young people engaged and in the loop. We have rolled out our Stay Connected, Stay Safe project that has reemployed our youth workers after only two weeks of closure to phone around our membership to find out what their needs are that might not be fulfilled by other services. They are also engaging our young people in weekly conversations to make sure they have someone to talk to and have access to any other things they need.

Whilst we build our digital and online skills (were still pretty old school here, but getting more capable every second), we hope to have some online homework clubs and group sessions up within a month.

If anyone has anything that they need help with, or if you run a service and think we can work together, please get in contact with Indiya Mccleary at Admin@fullcircleproject.org.uk