Bedfordshire PCC judging YouTube applicants to run activities for young people online all summer

Bedfordshire’s Police and Crime Commissioner, Kathryn Holloway, has received over 30 applications to help support young people in Bedfordshire during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Applications sent to the The Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner (OPCC), to help people aged between 10 and 25 - by running online activities on YouTube led by bodybuilding competitor James Campbell, are being reviewed to ensure that those who are successful can start producing content as soon as possible.

Organisations, regular YouTubers and charities submitted applications to provide activities such as skip beat, football-based, boxing and pilates fitness sessions, computer game building, chess lessons for beginners, street dance, arts and crafts, cooking and nutrition.

Kathryn Holloway said: "I’d like to thank everyone who’s pitched an idea to us. What’s important to me is that it’s clearly fun and introduces a new hobby which just might fire someone up to continue with it into the future when the pandemic is over or even to use it as a route to a future job, just as James Campbell has with fitness and bodybuilding which has led to him working as a personal fitness instructor.

"We had some great ideas and some very worthy ones which might qualify for funding elsewhere but they just didn’t meet the brief. Others gave us fantastic ideas but could not show us a video.

"Some of those organisations have been asked to show us an example of what they can produce in the next few days as I want The James Campbell Collective to go live with daily activities on weekdays from May to September."

As soon as successful applicants are notified, James Campbell will be working with the OPCC to arrange a weekly schedule to ensure a wide variety of content is available across the week for 10 to 25-year-olds in Bedfordshire.

He has produced the logo for the initiative and will be editing a video of sample films for partners working with young people to share to spread the news of what is available.

James said: "It is really exciting so many people applied, wanting to work together to provide young people in Bedfordshire with online activities during the pandemic.

"It is great to see such a variety and I can’t wait to watch them, as well as get started in providing my own daily fitness sessions."

PCC Kathryn Holloway added: "I’m so delighted to be getting this off the ground and to have such a brilliant figurehead to lead it in James. If we want young people to have something to do during the lockdown or the pandemic, whichever is the longer, he’s the ideal person to pull together these activities and the other inspirational people who want to deliver them."

For more about James Campbell visit: www.youtube.com/channel.