History

In 1996, in response to a stabbing in a school playground, the school’s headmaster asked Patrick Regan, a local church based youth worker, to come into the school and work with their students and teachers to help with difficult behavioural issues. This was the beginning of XLP, a Christian charity that has an emphasis on being faith-based, but not faith-biased: XLP works equally with young people of all faiths and none. Those who work at XLP share a common passion: to serve the community by meeting the social, educational and behavioural needs of young people, and empowering them to make wise lifestyle choices and to realise their potential.

Over the years XLP has grown from working in a single school to operating in over 30 schools and communities across Southwark, Lewisham, Greenwich, Bexley, Tower Hamlets and Newham. In the early days, Patrick began by hosting a lunch-time club on school premises that taught the kids more about their own heroes, and in particular how those heroes behaved. Today, on a day-to-day basis, XLP has projects dealing with a wide variety of issues including sex and relationship education, drugs awareness, anger management and weapons, poverty and fairtrade, prejudice and racism, and image and identity. One of our most recent projects, Gunzdown (www.gunzdown.com), has been focussed on guns and knives in schools and issues such as identity and anger management. Teamed with one of the U.K’s leading “hip-hop” bands, Greenjade, we have been touring the schools performing an hour long multi-media event combined with follow-up lessons dealing with these issues.

Whilst much of the work is based in the schools, XLP also works on a number of estates using both community facilities and XLP's own double-decker bus facility that has computer equipment for homework support upstairs, and a youth “chill” space downstairs.

XLP has also grown an Arts Showcase programme that is focused on encouraging pupils, especially those who for various reasons struggle academically, to express themselves in their own unique way through dance, comedy, drama, rap and singing. This arts programme, whose primary focus is on ’showcase’ and not ’competition’, encourages these pupils and aims to raise their self-esteem and sense of their own potential. Running throughout the year with the assistance and coaching of the schools' arts and music departments and the XLP team, pupils enter the XLP showcase school auditions. The best acts then participate in a borough final, the winners of which then enter an inter-borough final. Family, friends, teachers and peers are encouraged to come and see just what their young people can do.

XLP’s staff and student volunteers constantly confront many of the issues facing young people in our communities today, such as bullying and intimidation, weapons, boredom due to a lack of organised activities, absence of parents, and living in areas with high crime rates. All XLP staff and volunteers have enhanced CRB disclosures and work within strict child protection guidelines. For over a decade, XLP has witnessed positive stories of young people whose futures have changed from going nowhere to having hope and purpose. These stories rarely get aired but are the fuel that keeps the vision alive.