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<b>Full to the top or a ghost town</b>

For the first time in my professional career I ran an open community youth club on Halloween. Normally Halloween falls during school half term and as we follow school opening it has never happened before. We opened knowing that Halloween may have unusual impacts on numbers. We didn't know if the festival would encourage lots of people out of houses and therefore increase numbers or would people all have parties to attend and trick or treating to do and therefore decrease numbers? We opened the club not knowing what to expect in attendance or behaviour.

After being open for 30 minutes we had our answer. No one was coming. Not a single young person walked through our door. Our club was empty so we went out and did some detached youth work. We learnt a lesson about working on Halloween.

But this night got me thinking is it better to have too few or too many young people in a youth club?

When you have too many young people in a youth club I have found myself spending most of the evening dealing with behaviour and crowd control. The result being no engagement with young people in conversation or shared activity. No relationship building or informal education. But still the young people may have an enjoyable evening in a safe place, possibly with new experiences.

Now ignoring extremes when no one attends it is also a difficult situation when numbers are low. With low numbers the youth club workers who are spread out across the building may all be waiting to engage with the same people. This can put some strain on the young people but at lest we can be confident that no young person will be ignored. I think the greatest danger with this situation is workers getting demoralised, thinking the works not worth doing.

So I'm still not sure. Most clubs have a sweet spot for the number of young people attending ( this number can change over time and depends on everything from the age of people, the number of workers, the activities and even the weather.) But is it better to have more or less young people?

Sent from my iPod

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