THE FINANCE conference in the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, opened with an enthusiastic, ear-splitting bongo-drum welcome: an indication, perhaps, that the 200 moneylenders gathered there over the weekend were not your typical finance sector clones.
They are mostly teenagers or in their early 20s – members of YouthBank, a community development programme which has committees across Northern Ireland. Now they are spreading across the Republic, and in the last four years they have handed out £1.9 million of Ulster Bank’s money.
The grants are small, between £50 (€63) and £1,000 (€1,270), but they can make all the difference to groups with virtually no cash of their own, like Ballymena Swimming Club in Co Antrim.
The group’s swimmers wanted to compete in national meets, but there were no competition-length 50m pools anywhere near. They applied for a £900 (€1,143) grant to bring members to Dublin’s National Aquatic Centre.
Their application went before the Ballymena YouthBank committee, said one of the young committee members, Michelle Porter.
“We have a whole range of criteria to grade their applications, and we give them a score, with 10s for fantastic and ones for not so good. It took us about two months to give over the money,” she said.
She said she was proud of one recent grant: funding young Polish children to attend English classes. That grant caused heated discussion, she said. “We explained that everyone deserves money, no matter where they were from.”
Ulster Bank community investment manager, Nuala Hayden, said the programme boosted the confidence of the committee members. Debating the merits of different applications and learning to assess a project’s worth can build valuable skills, she said.