Getting the weekend started with the YMCA

It was great to help our friends at YMCA Derbyshire raise funds for their training and education centre for young people.

The Museum of Making was the venue for this year's annual YMCA ceilidh where guests had purchased a table and raffle tickets with money going towards to the centre.

YMCA Key College specialises in educating young people for whom mainstream education may have been unsuitable. Students from the catering course at YMCA were helping out on the night and were all smartly turned out for the occasion and eager to help. Many of them had helped out at similar events previously and had lots to tell me about them, including an event at Derby's cricket ground. The young learners were professional throughout all aspects of the service and a real credit to the team from YMCA. I was paired with Scott in a mentoring role for the evening and also spent a lot of time chatting to Kieran, speaking to both of them about how long they'd been at the college, what course content they had been enjoying and what their future plans were. As well as some more informal topics like what they'd usually be up to on a Friday night and what their favourite foods were, seeing as the 3 course meal we were serving was why we were there on the night.

After a briefing from Becky who headed up the catering department, myself and the learners greeted everyone to the venue and served up a three course meal clearing tables inbetween courses. This was set to background music from a live band and the guests enjoyed dancing after their meal. The catering team from YMCA had taken over the venue's kitchen to prepare the meal so it really was a fully YMCA organised event.

It was great to see lots of the guests had a vested interest in the young learners, many of them chatted to them as they recognised them from previous fundraising events and were eager to see how they were getting on in life.

The service and clearing up finished at 10pm and there was no need to get my marigolds out my bag so I headed home after saying bye to everyone.

Our main contacts at the YMCA were thrilled to have some help from GoodGym again, even though it was just myself. I've asked them to stay in touch for future events that we can hopefully support with. Unfortunately no photos as it wasn't suitable to have my phone with me whilst being a part of the serving team, it was good to set an example to the young learners who hadn't been allowed anything like phone access until after the service. I've included a photo from the YMCA catering team that was in the public domain, some of these people were at the event including Gary who was leading the catering team in the kitchen.