Another successful Youth Festival this year with 100s of young people and their families descending on Blyth marketplace on Thursday 9th August. This year the High Sheriff of Northumberland opened the festival and made a lovely speech about Silx and the postive impact our work has on the community which was very much appreciated, he then spent time with the young people and the other organisations finding out what they all do.
The Youth Festival takes place every year and is an opportunity for lots of Blyth and Northumberland based organisations to come together and showcase all of the positive things they do. This year Newsham and New Delaval Youth Forum, The Buffalo Community Centre, SureStart, The TA, Northumberland Sexual Health Team and Blyth police all had stalls. As well as this there was DJ entertaining the crowds, Balloon Moddelling and free candy floss.
Activities included inflatable slides, a rodeo bull, penalty shoot out, squeezy rider smoothy bike, SureStart playbus and laser tag; all of these activities were completely FREE.
Silx and Newsham worked together offering lots of free arts and crafts including bracelet making, windchimes and glitter tattoos which were very popular, infact lots of people were queing up to get one. As well as this Donna our Volunteer was running a stall centred around arts and mental health raising funds for the charity Young Minds.
Supergirl and Batman joined us for the afternoon, donning their stilts to entertain everyone and the young volunteers from Silx led the crowd in a mass performance of the Cha Cha Slide.
Jackie Long, our Senior Youth Worker said;
‘What another incredible youth festival. A big thank you to all of the organisations that supported this years event and thanks to our staff and voluteers. It was great to see the community coming together to enjoy the free activities’
Overall, the day was a huge success and the sun kept his hat on for the duration, we have had lots of lovely feedback since the event and we are looking forward to making next years event even better!