Youth Initiative

The YC Youth Committee

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Towards the end of 2019, the club decided to launch a major new Youth Initiative, aimed at recruiting new, younger members. The ambitious project targeted university students in London, with the aim of offering to teach every single one how to play bridge. That was a pretty massive task, as there are around 375,000 of them, but succeeding with even a fraction of these would be terrific. A YC Youth Committee was formed, comprising four of our younger members—the YCYC chairman was India Natt, working alongside Athena Chow, Louise Selway and Will Clennell.

The plans received a major setback in early 2020, along with everything else, when Covid hit the world. Nevertheless, plans continued to be developed with the aim of running courses, Covid permitting, in October 2020.

Much had to be done in order to reach out and contact potential new players. Importantly, once basic tuition has been provided, new players will need mentoring through further lessons and supervised play etc until they are able to develop further without assistance. So the idea was to run parallel student duplicates, organised alongside the regular Monday‑ and Friday‑night games, so that in time those who were keen could graduate to the main duplicates.

Although teaching for the first courses was to be provided by volunteers, there were significant costs associated with the youth project as a whole. Publicity costs are substantial and teachers will need to be paid later. So an ongoing appeal was launched to members to help raise funds.

The aim was to raise £50,000 to support this initiative, and we were confident that there were many YC members who would want to help out with donations for this important work. All donations are ring‑fenced for the Youth Project, and because this is part of our work as a registered charity, donations could be made subject to Gift Aid, which makes them worth more. In fact, despite Covid, donations and pledges were received totalling almost £17,000.

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Sadly, the virus did not abate the way it was hoped, and around mid‑2020 it became apparent that we would not be able to run the planned courses that year. Undeterred, the courses were re‑scheduled for October 2021, to be held in the new club premises in Hammersmith. But once again, Covid meant that the courses had to be cancelled.

The Youth Project is currently on hold, but the donations that have been collected are still ring‑fenced and earmarked for youth bridge. The funds are currently used on an ad‑hoc basis to subsidise bridge tuition for young players whenever possible, pending a time when it proves possible to relaunch a new major initiative.It is now hoped that the courses, as originally planned, will be held in October 2022. More details will be made available as soon as they are finalised.

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Meanwhile members can still make donations towards this project.

Donations are best made by bank transfer, using “YOUTH” as a reference (or “YOUTH ANON” if you don’t want your name publicised). The account details are:

If you have not already signed a Gift Aid form, supplies are available at the club or you can download one from the Gift Aid tab on the left of the website homepage.

Members can also help by spreading the word. Once details are known, you can recommend the courses to young people that you know—they don’t need to be exclusively for university students. You can recommend bridge courses to young peopleAll of you must know someone you could encourage to learn to play—sons or daughters, grandchildren, nephews or nieces, brothers or sisters, boyfriends or girlfriends, younger employees, a friend with young relatives etc. We all need to invest in the future of bridge, to ensure that the game we love is kept alive and enjoyed by many more generations!

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Item posted 20 October 2021, updated 26 June 2024