PROFILE: Janet Williams, owner of 'The Crib' Youth Club

Janet Williams has been running 'The Crib' Youth Club in De Beauvoir since its conception in 1999. She tells Chloe Lambert how her own experiences as a teenager inspired her to help the young people in some of Hackney's worst estates.

In November, in the early hours of a Sunday morning, a young man called Darren was shot as he walked with a friend through Hackney. As a silver car sped off he staggered across the street and collapsed in a pub doorway. Two young women knelt at his side and tried to stop the bleeding from the hole in his chest. But he died from shock and trauma a few hours later, aged 20.

Janet Williams spoke to Darren just last week when he turned up at one of her youth clubs. Now she will watch him be buried.

We are sitting in our coats on plastic stools, in a kitchen on a Hackney estate. She leans forward, looks out at the cold, dark sky and says: “Sometimes I don’t feel like going to work because you don’t know who won’t be turning up.”

Janet has been running The Crib since it was set up seven years ago to work with Hackney’s most excluded young people. Many are what Janet calls “latchkey kids”, bringing themselves up from an early age because their alcoholic or drug-addicted parents cannot cope.

“Some of them just turn up and go to sleep” she says. The project has expanded to offer everything from sexual health clinics to housing advice to weekends in Blackpool.

Janet was drawn to youth work after her own shocking childhood experiences on these very estates forty years ago. “My father was an abuser, physically and the other way,” she begins, flashing a mouthful of teeth that gleam against her dark skin.

She left school at 14, pregnant and barely able to read or write. Having had her second child by the age of 16, she fell into crime and an abusive relationship with a crack addict. After running away to America, she returned to Hackney and threw herself into helping the gangs of children she found sitting on stairwells. She says: “I looked around and thought: there’s nothing for young people here.”

The kids call Janet when they are arrested, when they are in court, when they are pregnant, when they want to leave home. Our conversation is interrupted almost every ten minutes by the vibrations on her mobile. She chatters noisily down the phone in the Patois slang used by kids across the city, hangs up and resumes telling her stories at the same breakneck speed.

“They still trust us because we go that extra mile. We don’t refer them on to somewhere else. We don’t treat them like a piece of paper.”

Despite many success stories, the Crib has faced hardship. Darren’s funeral is not the first that Janet has attended, and she is sure it will not be the last. Two years ago Hackney Council shut down the project and sold off its premises for luxury flats.

Janet began holding sessions in her flat. “No one listened to us. But then they realised what we’d been doing because the offending rates in the area started going up. So then they gave us another place. And around the same time my husband died.” A recovered crack addict, he threw himself off a tower block.

The way she drops these personal tragedies into the conversation, the way she squirms to get onto another subject, reveal another side to her extraordinary selflessness.

Perhaps her round the clock devotion to these children’s demons allows her to escape from her own. Her eyelids flicker and she looks solemnly across the room. The mobile vibrates again.

Copyright of The Hackney Post