Picture Credit: Mark Stedman
Ballaghaderreen Foróige Club took the top prize at the Aldi Foróige Youth Citizenship Awards for their project welcoming Syrian teenagers to their area.
The Awards took place in Citywest Hotel & Conference Centre on Saturday where over 2,300 young people from throughout Ireland showcased their work in the community.
On discovering that seven of the eighty Syrian refugees resettled in Ballaghaderreen are teenagers, this group decided to welcome their peers to the town and undertook a series of welcome actions for their new neighbours. They made a welcome poster and a welcome folder with individual messages which they had translated into Arabic. They then extended an invitation to the young Syrians to a social evening for which they made baked goods, taught each other how to pronounce one another’s names, did clay modelling and played pool. Lastly they presented their new friends with welcome packs of handmade friendship bracelets, woolly hats and chocolate bars.
Ballaghaderreen Foróige Club was competing against 203 other projects on topics such as equality; homelessness; mental health; culture and much more.