Play Youth Community

The PYC Service sits within Portsmouth City Council’s Housing, Neighbourhood and Buildings Directorate. Our locality based provision is supported by additional council funding and grants which enable us to offer open access services to all City residents.

PYC manages four community centres; provides six staffed adventure playgrounds and four youth clubs across the city and runs three additional youth projects. We also administer the HAF programme on behalf of the Children’s, Families and Education Directorate.

Play and Youth spaces support from early childhood in to adulthood, providing safe recreational spaces which are also informal educational environments, where children and young people are supported with their mental health and wellbeing.

Our staff receive specialist training in safeguarding and restorative practice, and in supporting children, young people and their families.

We run workshops in areas that impact children and young people, such as domestic abuse; healthy relationships; knife crime and exploitation; and eating healthily; thereby contributing as an early intervention service, reducing anti-social behaviour, risk of harm and improving life chances.

The objective of the adventure playgrounds is to offer ‘freely chosen play’ in adherence to Article 31 of the UN convention on the rights of the child to engage in play and recreational activity and participate freely in cultural life.

Youth work offers young people safe spaces to explore their identity, experience decision-making, increase their confidence, develop inter-personal skills and think through the consequences of their actions. This leads to better informed choices, changes in activity and improved outcomes for young people.

For further information please refer to our website : pycportsmouth.co.uk