About Us

Delivering high-quality youth work for over 100 years

Known as Brighton Boys Club until the early 1980s, Brighton Youth Centre is one of the longest continually running youth centres in the country.

Our Organisation Our Approach

Our Organisation

BYC is an independent charity with a volunteer Board and both paid and voluntary staff. We remain committed to open-access youth work for young people across the city and to providing welcoming, well-equipped facilities.

Continuity is central to our work. It underpins the strong relationships we build with young people and the wider community. Our independence enables us to listen closely to young people and respond quickly when new opportunities arise.

We work in partnership with a wide range of groups, allowing us to offer a broader programme and engage an even more diverse community of young people.

Our newly reopened youth centre offers excellent facilities for young people, staff, and partners, helping us deliver the best possible programme and ensuring continuity for many years to come.

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The new centre is a fully accessible, environmentally sustainable, state-of-the-art facility, open seven days a week.

All young people need a place to go where they can feel safe, make friends, learn new things and get support if they need it.

Our Approach

Brighton Youth Centre (BYC) is dedicated to delivering high-quality youth work in Brighton based on classic youth work principles: voluntary participation, informal learning, and positive association.

At BYC, young people learn by doing. Staff and volunteers run engaging activities, review these sessions with young people, and use their feedback to guide future programmes.

As a long-standing provider of youth work in Brighton, BYC is committed to involving the widest possible range of young people from across the city. The centre works with larger groups, encourages mutual learning, and creates opportunities for young people to build confidence, develop new skills, and form positive relationships.

Above all, Brighton Youth Centre aims to ensure that every young person has fun, feels supported, and finds a welcoming space to grow through meaningful youth work in Brighton.

I know Brighton Youth Centre well, having worked together on research-informed and practice-centred events bringing together youth workers, young people and others to develop and support youth work in Brighton and beyond.

I have often visited the youth club and spoken in depth with young people and youth workers there. BYC is a beacon of youth work – it has a long-established presence in the city, yet there is always innovation and development – not for its own sake but emerging from the creative energy, commitment and collaboration of young people, volunteers and professional youth workers.

Among its many strengths are its truly youth-centred practice (for example incredible festivals and arts events that are run by and for young people) and its strong and substantial support from (and to) volunteers, many of whom are former members of the club. Young people are respected, listened to, and feel a sense of belonging – those with complex lives and challenges have told me that they can talk to the youth workers about things they can’t tell other professionals, because they know the youth workers genuinely care and can support them.

Amongst this sometimes very serious and challenging work, the youth club is a fun, lively and nurturing place that creates space for a wide diversity of young people in terms of social class and income, gender/gender identity, race/ethnicity, disability, neurodiversity, and sexuality, who come together as well as creating spaces for themselves.

The young people and youth workers here are creative, reflective and original in relation to designing and using youth work spaces, and I am excited to see their ideas come to fruition.