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History

In August 1975 a few residents of the Morawelon Estate and London Road area of Holyhead came together, motivated not only by the lack of community spirit in the area but also by the lack of adequate facilities to serve the various needs of the children and young people living in the area.  Meetings were held to discuss what best could be done to meet the needs of the community.  In October 1975 Community Concern Holyhead was formed and its members decided to focus it energies on the numerous problems facing the youngsters of the area and to think of a project or scheme that might help them.  With assistance from the County Social Services Department and its Community Development Officer, the Youth project commenced in January 1976.  During this period, youth activities were held outdoors and committee members hired a room for their meetings and therfore it was decided that a permanent home was needed.  In January 1976 a letter was sent to the then Anglesey Borough County Council requesting the use of a derelict factory for conversion into a Youth House and centre for the community.  The request was immediately turned down but after a good active campaign by local residence and the local Councillor, the Bourough Council reversed it original decision and a lease granted on the old factory in Ffordd Tudur.  In October 1976, with 15 members on the general committee, Community Concern Holyhead had its Youth House and a centre for the community.  After a competition among the local children the building was named Gwelfor due to its location overlooking the sea and the logo would be a Bumble Bee.  The Bumble Bee was chosen after HMS Bee, a Naval Base which had been housed at the same location during the Second World War.

Gwelfor was born and the first few meetings were held amid bags of cement, leaking roof and by the light of paraffin lamps.  Work continued for the next couple of years to renovate the Youth House with some of the work being carried out by local fathers, raising money for the conversion and to register Gwelfor with the Charity Commission.  Throughout this period, work was at times slow and fustraiting, causing moral somtimes to be low, but through all the various difficulties the Committee, which now numbered more than two dozen active members and consisted of a Management Committee and a General Committee, stayed together.  Part of a quote from the first Newsletter sums up their belief:- We have a long way to go yet before we reach maturity.  It is imperative therefore that we grow up properly and that we learn to crawl before we walk.  The responsibility that we have taken on are tremendous.  The Gwelfor project demands a great deal of our time, talent and energy and all offered voluntarily. Herein lies the heart and the ultimate success of the whole project, namely local people taking the problems facing their children and youth upon their own shoulders not because they have to but because they want to.

On the 2nd of August 1978 after nearly two years, the renovations were completed and the lights were switched on at Gwelfor and it soon became the heart of the area where activities were held for all age groups.  The official opening was done by the Rt Hon. Cledwyn Hughes MP, later Lord Cledwyn, on November the 3rd 1978. 

Even though a new building, which was opened in 1996, stands where the original did and it is no longer Community Concern Holyhead but Gwelfor Community Concern, Gwelfor is still run by a Committee of volunteers, some of which have been members since its beginning so that old hands pass on the mantel to the new slowly and to ensure that its original aims and objectives remain as strong today as it did back in 1975.

It is thanks to the committee of volunteers and local people back in 1975 that the foundation for Gwelfor was born and their continued support and advice to the new group of volunteers, ensures that Gwelfor is still here serving the community.

Below is the original manifesto which still stands today:

Motivation

Our reason for being in existence developed as a result of deep concern regarding the problems facing the children and youth of the area. We were forced to come to terms with the fact that facilities for youngsters were virtually non-existent; that many of our younger population felt alienated from the community-at-large and that a great proportion of our young people and their parents have no experience of sharing in community life and no opportunity of acting responsibly on their own behalf.

Objectives

To offer our various talents and experiences to serve the children of the area, through numerous social, educational and recreational activities, with the intention of helping them on the road to mature and responsible adulthood. To provide a setting where people can work together for the sake of the whole community. To share our talents and experiences with one and other, in order that we as local parents can broaden our knowledge and develop our talents to serve our young people better; and to establish relationships with other bodies who are also concerned for the well-being of our children and youth and to learn from their experiences.

Methodology

To make people more sensitive to critical social issues in their community. To provide a setting where people can grow in responsibility and realize their potential as leader and agents of change. To bring about change in community values by providing the kind of experiences in which people will begin to think in new ways about their immediate environment.

To try and identify and tease out essential underdeveloped resources which people do not realize they have, or which have not been used in this sense before.

Consequently, the essence of the training part of our programme is INDUCTIVE as to a DEDUCTIVE form of learning. We hope to provide for one another a context in which skills may be appropriated and practised. We believe that the most effective way of training ourselves and others is by involving ourselves immediately in the problems facing our youngsters. We must let this be the determining factor for the rest of our training programme. The nature of the problem itself then becomes the basis for learning social skills, identifying resources that we can evoke to responsibility and working out how our beliefs and values can be related in a concrete fashion to social change.

Our hopes and good intentions must ultimately be tested for effectiveness. We believe that ordinary people should not only be allowed to make decisions for themselves, but also take upon themselves the opportunity and responsibility for running their own affairs. We must hold ourselves accountable for the project we develop and this can only happen if we are willing to test our ideas, our methods and ourselves, in the very middle of the life of the community.