THERE is new hope that Marlborough’s youth club will be saved as it reopens on Friday for a weekly drop-in session.

The Marlborough Community Youth Project will offer young people aged 13 and over a place to hangout, relax, and socialise.

The scheme, based at the Marlborough Development Centre in St Margaret’s Mead, will run every Friday between 4pm until 8pm for three months when the funding will run out.

Once this money is used up the group will have to find new funding if they want the project to continue.

The building was closed as a Youth Centre last August and the group is now paying to hire the facility.

Volunteers had to go to Marlborough Area Board to bid for £1,762 of Wiltshire Council money, which will be used to pay Wiltshire Council in hire charges.

Town councillor Lisa Farrell has spearheaded the campaign to get the youth centre up and running once again and is hopeful that she will be able to find the funding to keep it going.

She said: “I’ll beg if I need to.

“I want the kids to trust us so that they can say what they want to do but that’s going to take time.

“That’s not what has happened in the past, adults have decided what goes on but it’s not for us, it’s for the kids.

“I want to get my Youth Council up and running so that the two things can run alongside each other and then the youth council can take over the running of the club and we’ll just be there to help out.

“It’s going to take them time to see that we are going to stick around and fight for them.

“A lot of people in the town complain about young people hanging around but what do they expect when there is nowhere for them to go?”

The sessions will be run by 11 parent volunteers, who have been through all necessary police checks and training, on a rota basis.

The terms of the Area Board grant mean that only young people aged between 13 and 25 can be catered for so if volunteers want to provide a facility for younger children a different source of funding will have to be secured.

Coun Farrell said: “The volunteers have been absolutely brilliant so I’ve been really lucky.

“This is the first time any of us have done anything like this.

“A lot of people have contacted me on Facebook offering donations and coming up with fundraising ideas.”