Carrick Connect: Youth organisation's key message is to 'listen, encourage and support’

Carrick Connect is a local not-for-profit organisation aimed at interacting with young people from the ages of 11 to 25 years.

First established in November 2014, the organisation has 25 volunteers in total, with 11 in active status.

Like many community groups, their work was impacted over the past two years by restrictions relating to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Key among the services offered by Carrick Connect are mentoring programmes.

Project coordinator, Tracey McNickle explained: “Young people can be mentored weekly for as long as they need to be supported. They are taught strategies and techniques to help them cope with anxiety, stress or trauma and encouraged to seek professional help or further counselling if needed.

“Our aim is to listen, let our young people have a voice and help them understand the process of making positive choices.

“Carrick Connect also offer a support line, for young people and our community, that evolved through Covid as a need was identified.

“We listen, encourage and support and signpost onto the relevant services. This has proved very popular with sometimes up to 10 communications in a four hour period.”

Love/Hate project

Another initiative spearheaded by the group was the Love/Hate project, which looks into all aspects of the Holocaust and finishes with a trip to Krakow to visit the concentration camps. “This has been a very effective programme, with young people being very moved and changing their thought processes,” Tracey added.

“We also feel that if you know your history, you are more clued in to understanding how things in life can progress.”

One of the group’s long running programmes is Railtastic, which sees volunteers conducting outreach on the streets at weekends along the Larne line, both at stations and surrounding areas.

The programme aims to build positive relationships with young people by demonstrating a consistent presence and approach.

It also helps to discourage anti-social behaviour and encourage young people to make better choices and to think about the consequences to their actions, Tracey added. “A lot of our mentoring comes from those who get in touch with us on a Sunday or who we follow up on after the weekend. We work with the support of NIR security and staff.

“In years that have passed we have also ran Cartastic, which sees us bring a large ‘Chill’ cart vehicle to Marine Gardens to help alleviate anti-social behaviour, bring our community together and offer Saturday night fun and entertainment at no charge. This has however been unable to run due to Covid restrictions.”

Adapting to the pandemic

During the pandemic, Carrick Connect adapted all mentoring services and its support line, using online resources to keep up to date and on target with young people.

Acknowledging the huge impact lockdown was having on people’s wider mental health, the group also took on the challenge of making up wellbeing packs for young people and those in the community and delivering them on the doorsteps.

“We also worked hard on our Stones of Hope project, encouraging our community to paint a stone that will one day be displayed in Shaftesbury Park,” Tracey said. “Carrick Connect collected the stones from front doorsteps and currently have over 400 stones stored for when this project will take place.”

As restrictions ease, Carrick Connect is enjoying being back to face to face outreach. “We have enjoyed reconnecting with all our young people through mentoring and outreach and look forward to getting our Love/Hate project group to Krakow. We enjoyed a night with Forest Fitness NI interacting with our young people,” Tracey added.

“We just moved last year into new premises at Oakfield Community Centre, and look forward to being able to run events from there in the future.

“We have so many new ideas and projects planned that we hope will progress over the following year.”