Saif Khan, local Boxing coach with a background working for West Yorkshire Police, has set up SAIF SPACE – a new community café opening on 24 April located inside Buttershaw Youth Centre. He tells Asian Standard about the importance of community spaces, his ambitions for the future and describes a vision for a much safer Bradford.
We asked how the idea for SAIF SPACE came about: “I teach boxing up at Buttershaw youth centre and in the last 15minutes we have a healthy eating segment – where all the young people sit around, and we give them fruit that has been donated to us” Saif explains.
“It encourages them to socialise with unfamiliar people and it brings them out of their shell. So then I looked around and there wasn’t anything really established happening for those older, secondary school aged kids. So that’s how we decided to come up with the café!”
“Buttershaw Youth Centre is within a densely populated residential council community, and the secondary school is only a 5-minute walk from there. So I thought we could find a way for these young people to be able to come to us, have breakfast, chill with their friends, use the pool table, or sit on the couch and watch the TV.”
“This would have a positive effect on them not having issues in school, with teachers having to reprimand them for being disruptive. They might be disruptive because they’re not concentrating. Because they’re hungry.”
Adults will be included too. “From 9am until 10:30 we have adults so parents, guardians or anyone else in the community who wanted to drop in have breakfast with us. This would save the parents 50% of the heating bills, because their heating would only be on for an hour and then they could come with us.”
His vison is not just limited to Buttershaw, in the future Saif hopes to continue his hard work across more areas of Bradford. “This area of Buttershaw, I think it could be the secondst deprived [in the country] after Canterbury” revealed the boxing coach.
“So I was thinking once we get this up and running and we get the template right – we would look at rolling this out to other areas that need a similar sort of step up. So that’s the plan.”
In 2019, Bradford was ranked the fifth most income deprived local authority in England. It was found to have 15% of the district’s households in fuel poverty, 22% of children found to be living below the poverty line.
“Without these sorts of centres, so many of these young people could be adversely affected” says Saif.
His background has proved invaluable in understanding what kids and adults in the community really need and what would help them. “I actually worked for the police; I retired three years ago. I did loads of different roles, the last one was in positive action – so it was trying to recruit, retain, and upskill individuals who were from a minority group or people who were disproportionally represented [in the force].”
“Because I had contacts in the police service, I knew the importance of early intervention. With these young people, we want them to get used to seeing the police – not when they’ve been in trouble, or something has happened in the house, or occasions when the police have had to come and enforce the law – but in a more positive way. So whilst they were in this space I encouraged some police officers to come.”
“On average we have like 145 young people coming through the doors every week. That’s 145 young people that are being supported and safeguarded, instead of being drawn towards nefarious individuals.”
“It’s more about these young people who are six years old and upwards – getting them to feel comfortable speaking to police. So as they get older and if they’re outside, there might be someone thinking ‘oh its Halloween lets be mischievous let’s throw some bricks at the police van’ or something. Instead, they might say oh, hold on, what if officer Ryan is there. Or if officer Nadia is there. Let’s not do that. That’s why it was important for me to get police involved in an early stage.”
Positive role models play a huge part in Saif’s strategy and he plans to regularly invite external guests to the café. Past guests who have already attended Saif’s boxing sessions to speak to the kids have included successful local faces from the community such as Bradford’s own professional boxer Darren Tetley.
SAIF SPACE community café obtained some funding from UKSF cost of living. “I was successful in getting 50% of what I’d asked for. That kind of gets us out of the starting blocks” explained Saif. “This funding will stretch us to possibly 10-12 weeks. And the plan is, once we’re up and running, we can then use that momentum to apply for [funding from] other organisations.”
“The money we’ve got from the funding will be used to cover the breakfast, any staffing, and a little bit of rent that we might have to pay for the building.
Without the funding, although it will only last us 10-12 weeks, we couldn’t even get [the café] off the ground. Hopefully people will see the benefits of such a service within that community.”
“The plan is to keep this running for as long as possible and then once we make this a regular thing embedded within Buttershaw, then it is up to me to look at other areas and say, hold on a minute, look what is happening in this particular area of Bradford.”
“All of it is only possible because of the funding. I think it is really important to have these community youth centres open.”
The café opens on 24 April and more details can be found at: saifspace.co.uk
