2025 will see a new year that presents challenges to ensure that our young people continue to be given somewhere to go, something to do and someone to show them how they can develop life-skills through sport, art and cultural activity.
No organisation is comparable in that commitment than the YMCA.
The end of 2024 saw a number of Youth related facilities as well as longstanding boxing clubs in particular closed at the expense of government provision and policy declarations to the contrary.
The Central YMCA at Tottenham Court Road, London is the very symbol of this growing trend with the selling of this facility to a real estate developer. A campaign is now underway in order to prevent the sale. There is also support from Camden Council with a 5,000-signature petition. We need more signatures; more action and more lobbying of our London mayor to intervene. My interests are declared, The Central YMCA was the reason I became a World Champion. Three times a week every week in the 80’s, I trained at the YMCA where I met a Brazilian student who taught Capoeira.
The Youth Charter Call2Action is a further Call 2 Action that sees this facility retained to and for the benefit of the young people and communities that it has served locally, nationally and internationally for the past 122 years!!!
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