Life Centre is helping teens with life skills

“I FIND it unbelievable that I came in here and fell in love with education,” says William “The King” Cooper, as we chat in the front room of the Cork Life Centre.

William is 18 and has been part of the Cork Life Centre for five or six years now. He’s a confident, considerate young man who says he owes everything to this place.

The Cork Life Centre is a voluntary organisation which offers one-to-one tutoring for children who have fallen between the cracks of our education system and who have become marginalised. Situated on Winter’s Hill, in Sundays Well, in the old Christian Brothers’ Edmund Rice House, it receives only minimal funding from the Department of Education.

“The first thing I loved about this place is that it’s built like a home,” says William.

Cork Life Centre director, Don O’Leary, says William is right.

Edmund Rice House was originally the home of the Lord Mayor of Cork and - from the window of what was once the ballroom - Don shows the clear view down across the river to the building that was Cork’s Mansion House from 1767 to 1842, and is now the Mercy Hospital.

During school term, the former ballroom is a bustling kitchen, preparing up to a hundred hot meals a day. Don says it’s very important that no-one here goes hungry.

“Our top cook, Morgan, has degrees in Geography and History, but he hasn’t got to teach yet, because his passion is for cooking.”

Don says the role of the Life Centre is to offer kids a holistic approach to education, placing as much emphasis on social education as on academic education.

“Leaving Cert results often tell nothing of the work that went into getting those results,” Don says.

“These are young people who were told from an early age they wouldn’t amount to this.

“A lot of the young people we see have gone through great trauma. It takes a lot to rebuild a person’s confidence, and that’s what we try to do here.”

Don believes education should not be just about exam results. “If you have a fabulous Leaving Cert but you can’t go outside your front door for anxiety, what good is that Leaving Cert?”

Last year, 11 young people availed of the Life Centre’s help and overcame various levels of difficulty to successfully complete their Leaving Certificate examinations. The Life Centre offers an alternative learning education for children who, for one reason or another, have not thrived in mainstream education.

On the wall in the front room is printed the legend “Always remember you are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem and smarter than you think.”

It’s a quote often attributed to A.A. Milne, but it reputedly comes from a Disney Winnie the Pooh film. No matter, it is apt here.

William Cooper says he didn’t get on in mainstream education, and he found himself falling under the influence of older lads. He says drink and drugs were a common theme in his circle. While he says he didn’t abuse drink and drugs himself, he does concede that he “went off the rails” and misbehaved. He says this made him a target for teachers who, he claims, bullied him and wrote him off in his first year in secondary school.

“As a teenager, your hormones are all over the place,” William says. “One day you’re full of rage and ‘F**k this’ and the next day you’re neat and tidy and you want to do well. Your hormones are all over the place. And by then people have already judged you, and then the teachers are expecting you to fail.”

William claims he hit crisis point when a teacher predicted to him he would up “like the other scumbags.”

William says he spent three months indoors before his dad got him an interview at the Cork Life Centre and, he says, it changed his life.

At first, he says, he couldn’t get over the informality of the Life Centre, noting that everyone is on first name terms. He says that the opposite of the norm in more formal secondary educational settings, a great way to wind up the teachers here is to call them “Sir” or “Miss.”

“There’s that bit of respect there,” he says. “By getting to know the teachers, they got me talking about my passions – at the time, gaming and astronomy – and then I got writing essays and suddenly I realised I loved education!”

Darcy Faye jokes about the notion of “education by stealth” too.

“The Life Centre is teaching us so much. I was always behind in my education. Here I’ve passed everything. It’s very much about your life. You don’t even realise you’re learning most of the time!”

Darcy was 18 when she came to the Life Centre, and considers herself lucky to have been accepted. She says she saw a lot of bullying in her previous school and had stood up for people. She says because of this, she was labelled a problem student. She says she had withdrawn into herself before she came here. Two years on, she is waiting on her Leaving Cert results.

“Everyone here has a smile,” she says. “The students are so kind. It’s more like a family here than a school. Thankfully I got a place here. Everyone was saying to me ‘We never saw you so happy!’” Talking with students here, one word is mentioned over and over.

“Family” is a recurring theme, with students likening their peers to siblings.

“And Don is like a father to us,” says Darcy, of the director and his deputy, Rachel Lucey.

“And Rachel is like a mother. Older sister! Older sister! Rachel would kill me if she heard me say she was like a mother to us!”

Darcy says she suffered terribly from social anxiety before she became part of the Life Centre, and says she never would have thought she would have had to confidence to give a public speech – as she did recently – in front of the Lord Mayor of Cork. She seems a kind, articulate and clever young woman.

Darcy’s friend, Amber O’Callaghan, is a former student and is now an advisory panel member of ‘Jigsaw’, the youth mental health service. She too experienced bullying in school and it left her suffering from anxiety and panic attacks. She says she fell into a bad crowd and, such was her despair, she felt for a while glad of the company.

She says she loved the Life Centre from the moment she came here, being especially impressed by the informality of the place.

Amber says she hated subjects like History and English when she arrived here and – thanks to her teachers Jason and Peter – she ended up falling in love with both subjects.

She says that she started writing essays and she went on to become a published poet. She says Don introduced her to the idea of counselling and “My whole life changed”.

Amber seems a bright, intelligent and compassionate person, and she says her experience in the Life Centre gave her back her self-confidence. “I started to become the person I used to be, the person I was meant to be.”

Amber still volunteers here. When asked what she might say to her younger self, if she could, Amber laughs. “Run to the Life Centre!” Daragh Cotter is 16 and has been a student for five years. He came here suffering from severe social anxiety, not helped, he says, by his tendency to over-analyse everything. He says he found the transition from primary to secondary school very difficult and found being in large classes was causing him sensory overload. He finds the Cork Life Centre a much gentler experience.

“Everything here is done individually,” he says. “There is no assumption on generalisation.

“Everyone here is equal. It might be harder to do that in larger, more mainstream schools.” Daragh agrees this is more a family than a school.

“Everyone comes out friends in the end here. You couldn’t stay mad at your siblings forever, could you?” When asked if he could give one piece of advice to his younger self, struggling with anxiety, Daragh says it’s not that simple.

“You can’t give a one-liner and suddenly you’re cured. You need to take a break and just think. You need to understand what’s happening before you can address the issue.” He says the Life Centre has helped him hugely and brought him along in leaps and bounds.

He comes across a thoughtful and deeply intelligent person.

“I couldn’t have imagined speaking with a stranger about my anxiety before.”

William says the Life Centre gave him confidence in himself. He is now a six-times Irish champion in jujitsu and he has big plans for the future, training in Mixed Martial Arts with Conor McGregor’s coach, John Kavanagh.

“I will become a professional and I know for a fact I will be a champion. I owe that confidence to the Life Centre.

“I call myself ‘The King’, but I’m just me. I couldn’t me any more me. This place down to the ground taught me how to be myself.”

The important thing to remember,” says Don O’Leary, “is there is worth in every human being. Respect is a two-way street and our red door is always open. If a young person says ‘I want to get back into education’, we will do everything we can to help.”

“They saw something in me that I couldn’t see in myself,” says Darcy Faye, with a smile. “I owe them my life.”