Recently, Centrestage won the East Ayrshire Community Planning Partnership award for lifelong learning as well as the overall award for community provision for our work with the most vulnerable and hard to reach groups within our community, including care home residents, people of all ages with Additional Support Needs and men within HMP Bowhouse.

One of the men with whom we worked in Bowhouse sought us out when he was released and showed the most fervent and desperate desire to start again that we have ever encountered. He spoke of little else when we were delivering the programme within Bowhouse and, upon release, he came to Centrestage to ask for help and advice. Centrestage is for anyone, regardless of age, background or ability.
 
He was always incredibly grateful for the support that we gave him and we tried very hard to make him see the value and potential that he definitely had. He understood and fully adhered to the strict rules of Centrestage and the high standards we expect of everyone who is part of it.
 
We lost contact with him early in the New Year and unfortunately he reverted to the life he had known before. He knew that this meant he could no longer be allowed to benefit from our help. We saw him one further time, when he made the decision to apologise to us for letting us down and to confess to the sad and tragic act that took place in Troon.
 
We are immensely proud of our team and the CS members who welcomed him as part of our community. All we could try to do was open his eyes to the choices he could make in his future but, for him, these opportunities came too late in his life. All that this experience has done is make it even more urgent that, as a community, we find a way to intervene earlier in the lives of those children and young people who are on an inevitable path to failure. The outreach projects that we have in place aim for this early intervention and have the potential to make a crucial difference to our community. One of our many targets this year is to make the delivery of these programmes a reality.
 
We would like to thank our Centrestage community for the incredible support we have received throughout this difficult time.

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