"I'D PROBABLY be all strung out to bits by now," says Sara. She had been asked what would have happened to her without the project which has just celebrated 10 years in St Michael's Estate in Dublin.
Blighted by very high levels of unemployment, the Inchicore estate can do with all the help it can get. But a key aspect of St Michael's Parish Youth Project, which works with children - some as young as seven - and teenagers having difficulties coping with school, is that it was started by local people.
Its first home was in a flat on the estate but it now occupies a spacious building on the grounds of the Sisters of Mercy schools in Goldenbridge which runs along aside the flats. "Outside of here the problem is big - drugs, crime," says project worker, Gwen Doyle. "They only have to open the door and it's there."
It's there now more than ever. Some of the people moved out of other areas by vigilantes have ended up on the estate. "You meet people shooting up in the middle of the day," said one of the young people on the project. "It has got a bit scary.
Its focus is on personal development, achieved through developing relationships with the young people attending the project and challenging their behaviour if this is needed. Challenging people's behaviour in this context means working with them to change the unacceptable behaviour instead of just barring them.
"Mainline organisations bar difficult people but we would have serious discussions with them and they have always come back," says Gwen. Art is an important part of the project which has a close and continuous relationship with the nearby Irish Museum of Modern Art in the Royal Hospital Kilmainham. Work produced by the project has been shown at the IMMA.
Young people come to the attention of the project through the Family Resource Centre on the estate, the local girls' and boys' schools and the project workers' own knowledge of the area.
There is nothing magical or strange about what projects of this kind do. Usually, through very ordinary activities, they provide a form of stability for the young people attending them, they encourage them to do well and to avoid the many pitfalls around them and they help them to relate to each other - again through ordinary activities - in better ways.
The estate is fortunate in having schools at each end - the classic combination of the Sisters of Mercy at one end and the Christian Brothers at the other. Yet the proportion of young people who complete formal education to Leaving Cert level is relatively low.
From the project, "only two in 10 years have done their Leaving Certificate", says Gwen. "For those who did, their difficulty in getting jobs was huge." There was agreement among the young people we met that their attitude to school was to get out as fast as possible and get a job.
What kind of job was available for early school leavers, we wondered. "FAS or Youthreach." To them, it seems, a FAS course is not a preparation for a job, it is the job. Stephen, who started with the project as a child and is now an adult volunteer, found Youthreach better than school for the reason that he got paid.
In addition, "when I went to Youthreach I was doing woodwork which is what I wanted to do". Of the value of education, he says: "It's not what you know, it's who you know."
Peer pressure is an important aspect of the unwillingness of these young people to continue to Leaving Cert level. It's hard to stay on in school if all your friends are leaving, says Gwen.
It's not all down to personal choice. For kids growing up on an estate characterised by unemployment, poverty and, above all, powerlessness, the odds stacked against them when it comes to succeeding in the outer world are high.
"You can't just work in isolation from everything else," says project worker, Brian Healy. Real progress means "changing the structures that create situations like this."
For this reason, Gwen is a member of St Michael's Action Project which fights on behalf of the estate on issues such as refurbishment. "We would feel society discriminates against young people in projects like this," she says.
The project is funded by the Department of Education through Comhairle le Leas Oige. Its 10 years of work with young people, many of whom have stayed as adult volunteers, is a valuable local success story.