The phrase ‘it takes a village to raise a child’, came into sharp focus for me on our recent Community Britain visit, where we supported Miatta Fahnbulleh MP’s campaign to increase and better coordinate youth provision across her constituency.

In a room full of youth workers, we watched as a map became densely populated with colourful pins identifying the breadth of youth provision in the borough. Both looking at the map and listening to the stories shared, it became clear that Peckham is a place rich in care and investment in its young people, with a huge ambition to go further.

I appreciate, however, that a strong network of youth services is not the case for many communities. Even down to where I’m from in Yorkshire, youth provision is few and far between. But what is common across the whole of the UK is that any form of youth provision has always come with challenge. Low and erratic funding, systemic devaluation of youth work and years of political neglect has meant that youth services have always relied on communities, and indeed the ‘village’, to sustain them.

Despite this backdrop, the room in Peckham was not one of despair or hardship, but instead vibrancy, passion and enthusiasm, so much so that not one person stayed seated.

A few days later, we dropped into a basketball session at the Damilola Taylor Centre, and immediately it became clear where the youth providers got this energy from: the young people. Even though a storm raged on outside, these young people showed up, ran around and didn’t hesitate to tell us what their club meant to them. In this afterschool club their ambitions for their futures were created, whether it was to play basketball professionally or to become a youth worker themselves.

When we asked one boy what he would be doing if he wasn’t at the session, his answer was that he’d probably be in his room on his phone. It pointed to a wider trend that’s been playing out across the country since 2010. Austerity-driven cuts hollowed out shared community spaces just as social media surged. Time spent online has increasingly replaced time spent together, with young people most impacted as they’ve never known any different.

It is no wonder then that young people are now the loneliest age group in Britain. The very places that once brought them together have now disappeared, with more than 1000 youth clubs having closed in the past decade alone. When we lose shared spaces, we lose with them shared experience, pushing more people to spend time alone, and inevitably more time online.

Stories particularly of young men who have been radicalised online and filled with hate and division are sadly commonplace in today’s news. This isn’t a shock when we are fed algorithms that tell us what to watch, what to think and what to believe. Nor should it shock us as bad faith actors from Tate to Farage seek to exploit anger and alienation, with young people too often falling victim.

But what struck me in Peckham was a very different picture to the one that we are used to seeing; it was one of connection. The young boys told us how they’d made friends at the club that they now speak to everyday. They picked each other up, both literally when they fell over from running too fast, and metaphorically in putting an arm round each other to give support whenever the other needed it.

We also saw the invaluable role of youth workers in opening the possibility for connection, but crucially letting the young people take the lead. One told me of a football session he puts on every week, where he suggested the young people just sit and have a chat at the end. They now don’t come for the football, but to be vulnerable in a chat they themselves didn’t know they needed.

None of this is to say that the threat of radicalisation isn’t very much alive or even that there is a quick fix to it, but it is to say that there is a counter story out there, a counter story that should be available for every young person. One of hope and energy and life. One where shared space brings shared experience. One that starts in a youth club.