Making It by Jay Blades

Author:Jay Blades [Blades, Jay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

9

Lions and Mongolian prisoners

I HAD GONE INTO BUCKINGHAMSHIRE NEW UNIVERSITY clueless, floundering and not knowing what I wanted to do with my life or even which course I wanted to study. I left with a sense of purpose and on a mission.

I felt like a more serious, bigger person. Now I had a goal and I could envisage a proper place for me in society. For years, I had been like a Scalextric car with no track, revving my engine with nowhere to go. Now, I suddenly had a course to drive down. I had a purpose, and a direction.

All of my experiences, from Youth at Risk through my degree and the police project, made me realize: Wow! I can talk to people! I can make a change in their lives, for the better! For the first time, I felt respected for something other than how handy I was with my fists.

It was a new feeling, and I liked it very, very much.

After Street Dreams’ success in Oxford, Chief Super McWhirter passed our details on to a police chief in Banbury. This guy asked us to improve some troubled race relations in the town, where there had recently been bad disturbances between white and Asian youths.

Jade and I visited the town and began to formulate a plan to tackle its issues. And I began to realize just what a shit-hot partnership we could become in Street Dreams. Right from the start, she and I were a dream team.

We came at problems with the same passionate desire to solve them – but from totally different directions. Our skill sets were a million miles apart and yet utterly complementary. There is no other way to put it: we were yin and yang.

I approached things on a totally street, gut level. I knew what I wanted to achieve but I wouldn’t necessarily know how to organize stuff to make it happen. I could talk to angry young people, on their level, and I could get through to them, but authority figures were difficult for me.

Jade was the exact opposite. She was sophisticated and charming and professional and she saw the big picture. She could communicate with the officials and local authorities and get them on board. She could draw up our bids, write the reports and quantify what we were doing.

We came from different worlds but when it came to community work, we quickly became a power couple – a match made in heaven. Jay and Jade: even our names seemed to fit together. And this unlikely pairing began achieving some pretty amazing results.

In Banbury, I started talking to the young people on the streets but Jade and I knew it was also important to get the elders on board, particularly in the Asian community. So, I went to the mosques to pay respect to the elders there and establish a dialogue with them.

Some of the older imams didn’t want to know and denied that there was any problem with their young people.

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