The Link Family and Community Centre

I've been privileged to be involved with The Link Family and Community Centre in my home town of Newtownards over the past ten years.

They do fantastic, groundbreaking community development work and need as much help as possible!! Their website is www.thelinkcentre.org. I went on a training residential with some of the volunteer team to Lucan, Dublin earlier this year and was asked to write a bit about it for their newsletter.

Pulling up at the Clarion Hotel in Lucan with the rest of the group on Friday night I realised it was ten years since my last visit to this ever-expanding Dublin suburb. Back in 1997 I’d been getting to know a group of friends through The Link’s Friday and Saturday night drop-ins for a few months and the prospect of a weekend away with them all was too good to turn down. As a sixteen year-old veteran of church youth club weekends I thought I knew what to expect. Instead it was the first of many experiences with The Link when you feel a bit uncomfortable with something while realising you’re benefiting from it at the same time.

I tried to keep this feeling in mind at a reception for Link volunteers and staff in the Aras An Uachtarain, the residence of Mary McAleese the Irish President on the Sunday afternoon. Like the memorable weekend spent in a draughty monastery overlooking the Govan area of Glasgow, this residential was another Link experience that would undoubtedly be for my benefit in the long run. People as diverse as Link volunteers, Loyalist representatives, and Protestant clergy have all been welcomed through the Irish President’s gates – if only we were as welcoming to people in our own (much smaller) backyards. In Belfast over 40 “peace” lines still exist across the city, racially motivated attacks are rarely out of the local news, and up at Stormont the Good Relations strategy “A Shared Future” sits gathering dust.

In the meantime, organisations such as The Link continue to take risks and deal with social issues that remain unresolved. At Lucan youth centre in 1997 we looked at our perceptions of the Roman Catholic community and we were back at Lucan Presbyterian Church ten years later still asking the same questions, this time with an added multi-cultural dimension. Ten years ago we took the bus into central Dublin and for the first time I encountered young children begging for food and money along O’Connell Street. Fast forward to June 2007 and the forlorn roadside caravans of Dublin’s travelling community dotted along the motorway on our journey to Kilmainham Gaol was a stark reminder that the increased prosperity promised by the Celtic Tiger has widened rather than narrowed the gulf between rich and poor in the South. Over same period of time The Link has developed it’s services to continue to meet the needs of the marginalized in Newtownards, and trips such as this serve the dual purpose of being a reminder of the work to be done yet also an encouragement that we are struggling in the right direction!

Ten years on my involvement with The Link has progressed from young person to volunteer, from volunteer to staff member, and back to volunteer again. Yet each residential still manages to be challenging, stimulating and fun. I look forward to comparing notes at the Clarion Hotel in 2017!