Crosby Youth Café – The Mix Crosby

Volunteering, jobs & education

Volunteers Week 2020 To celebrate #NationalVolunteersWeek, we featured one of our fabulous volunteers each day and gave a little information on some of the wonderful things they’ve done to help The Mix Youth Café in Crosby Village. Unfortunately we could not hold a presentation event due to lockdown, but posted out certificates. Kim Sweeney Kim has been with us every step of the way and is actually one of the Directors at The Mix Youth Café. She handles all our social media accounts and in response to the current Covid 19 situation, has been instrumental in providing an online service for our members, via Discord. Kim works at the youth café whenever she is available and her youthful outlook brings an additional dimension of knowledge and skill to our programme. At the last count, Kim had racked up an amazing 300 hours of voluntary work for us and this is all the more amazing when you consider that Kim is a full time student at Preston University, studying fashion and design. Felicity Barker Felicity - or Fliss - as most people know her, is the current Miss Beauty UK!! The most important criteria to be eligible for this title is to have a beautiful personality and a willingness to help local charities and charitable organisations throughout the year. To this end, The Mix Youth Café was over the moon to be nominated by Fliss as one of the charities she would support throughout her 2019-20 term. She has worked as a volunteer member of staff on several occasions and, as mention above, helped organise the raffle at our fundraising Band Night at Stamps. Fliss also supports us on social media by publicising The Mix and sharing our posts with her followers – she has over 2,000 on Instagram! Peter Wintersgill Peter is a well-known local musician and a student at the prestigious Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts – LIPA. When Peter recently opened his own promotions company - PWP - he offered to organise a fundraising Band Night for us and how could we refuse. As well as securing the world-famous venue, The Cavern, and getting a fabulous line-up to volunteer their time and talent, Peter designed the posters and tickets and arranged all the printing, all the publicity and was responsible for almost all of the ticket sales. He liaised with all the Cavern staff, sound technicians, stage managers, security personnel etc and did all the other little and big things which Promoters do to make events run smoothly and successfully. Steven Steven arrives at The Mix Youth Café most Friday evenings with his guitar to play songs throughout the evening. We have some well-known favourites which we all like to sing along to in our own brand of chaotic harmony! Steven has also developed a repertoire of “Drumming Songs” and we all make a lot of noise by banging to the beat on the tables. The louder, the better! And great stressbusters! Steven’s voluntary time was recognised this with a Shining Stars Award and he plans to continue to develop these musical and entertaining skills for his Gold Duke of Edinburgh Award. Grace and Neveah Sisters, Grace and Neveah are regular members at The Mix Youth Café and we were delighted to accept their offer to help clear and tidy our venue at the end of each session for the Service Section of their Duke of Edinburgh Awards. Their volunteering roles soon developed into assisting with the nightly programme and Grace and Neveah now take responsibility to prepare quizzes for the young people and test their musical knowledge on the latest tunes. Sometimes they utilise the club’s wifi facilities to integrate quizzes with smart phones.