Youth project with a difference

JUST when the future for the voluntary sector looked more bleak than ever, comes news to inspire.

The project is all the more laudable for being astutely targeted to address a failure in state welfare provision. It will address the problem of six out of ten youngsters currently leaving care with no qualifications. To make matters worse, more than one in five experiences homelessness.

In these statistics can be found the breeding grounds of frustration, despair and, in its bleakest manifestation, criminal and anti-social behaviour. But the very intervention that Mr Laidlaw’s project has initiated has also triggered Executive commitment and support. Seldom has a project so united political opposites as this one. For that reason alone, it deserves to succeed.