Public areas in Broadstairs have received some fantastic TLC over the past year or two and more recently, due to the Community Payback Team’s work, to improve the community by cleaning and painting.
They have made a huge difference to public areas in Broadstairs, work including refurbishing the clock tower, clearing down all of the handrails and re-painting dedicated memorial benches.
For 22 years, Danny Ward has been a supervisor for the Community Payback Team and this most recent work in Broadstairs has been taking place over the last year thanks to Broadstairs and St Peters Town Council and VisitBroadstairs.
Community Payback is a community payback scheme where offenders are required to do unpaid work to pay back the community for the crimes they committed, helping to make a local area a safer and better place to be, working on a range of community projects.
The Community Payback Team in Broadstairs receive supplies for the work from The Broadstairs and Tourism Leisure Association and they do the labour; Danny explained that council projects such as this one are not as common as they used to be.
The response the community is amazing, Danny told CommunityAd. He explained how for many of the young people that have community payback sentences, have never really had the opportunity to work and most of them have never been given positive feedback. For many of the people serving they not only learn new skills and have local residents come up to them and say ‘thank you’. For some of these young people the opportunity to make a difference to their community and take pride in what they have done can give them a lot of confidence in themselves.
The payback team will see a maximum of 8 people turn up each day for their service, however, Danny usually supervisors 5 people. Danny told CommunityAd, “For some of the team, the response from the public can make such a difference to that individual. We recently finished cleaning and refurbishing some memorial benches and we have some special emotional responses from the families of the benches saying thank you.”