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Ninety two balloons were released in the middle of Manningham, Bradford, last month, one for each ethnic community in the city.

That’s 92 ethnic groups in a city of fewer than 500,000, whose racial divisions exploded with such ferocity last summer that they are still clearing up the mess.

A city whose potential for a rich cultural diversity seems to have been squandered by years of self-imposed segregation, and whose people, according to a report last year by former Commission for Racial Equality chief Sir Herman Ousely, have been left "in the grip of fear".¹

But it is also a city that is keen to put racial disharmony behind it, that wants to be known more for Bronte and Hockney than for burning and looting, and that is energetically promoting its bid to become the European Capital of Culture.

So, along with Burnley and Oldham, which were also hit by inter-racial turmoil in 2001, Bradford is having to take a hard look at its education system, its housing policies and its youth services.

According to A Place for Us All, a recent report by the Commission for Racial Equality, youth services play a major part in providing the kind of "social seam" that brings together young people from different ethnic backgrounds and encourages greater respect for different cultures.²

But how exactly does one create a multicultural youth project in an ethnically divided city where schools practise what Ousely described as "virtual apartheid"?

According to Kerr Kennedy, who manages Bradford’s Voluntary Youth Organisation Network, the challenge is not necessarily as difficult as it sounds.

"Obviously if you are running a very regionally based project on an estate in north Bradford you’ll be dealing with mainly white kids while in the inner city areas they will be mainly Asian. But there is a recognition among youth workers and young people themselves that there needs to be more integration, and there is a lot of good work going on to achieve that."

Kennedy, who has been working in Bradford for eight years, claims that despite the disturbances, ethnic tensions between the city’s young people are easing. He points to a number of projects that have managed to bring together young people from various ethnic backgrounds.

These include the Youth Development Partnership which is establishing multi-racial teams of local young people to act as role models and peer educators, running sports, health and sustainable regeneration programmes. There is a pilot anti-racist peer education project that aims to recruit young people to combat racism in their own communities.

Kerr is also on the management board of the Bradford Connexions programme that was launched on 2 September. Connexions is cited in the CRE report as providing a means to combat racial discrimination in recruitment by providing mentoring and work experience opportunities for young people from all parts of the community.

"Although Connexions is all about helping the individual, and it’s too early to say what effect it will have, I’m keen to make youth work a central part of the programme and hopefully it will help to bring people together," says Kennedy.

The positive picture of youth work in Bradford painted by Kennedy has been backed up by a complimentary Ofsted report on the local authority’s youth services. It is, however, somewhat at odds with the situation uncovered by Adrienne Katz, chief executive of Young Voice, who spent time in the city last year interviewing young people.

"There are, undoubtedly, some wonderful projects going on in Bradford," she says. "But often they are the small-scale schemes that offer much more intimacy than the broad-brush youth work programmes. What they do is great but they only reach a small number of people and they don’t have the funding to expand."

She cites a recent project run by the council’s Countryside Service that achieved great things in improving the independence and self-confidence of a small group of young Asian women. "There were 14 women, 11 of whom went on to university. Yet the project couldn’t get funding for another worker," says Katz.

Indeed, funding problems such as these prompted the CRE report to call for youth services to be given statutory status.

One of the more depressing findings of Katz’s research, published earlier this year in the report Thwarted Dreams, was the disturbing degree of despondency among Bradford’s young people.³ Fewer than half of the students interviewed felt they would achieve their goals. They were less satisfied than the national average with their careers advice, and more than twice as likely to say "I don’t have the skills".

Of particular concern was the level of racial harassment and violence the young people experienced on the streets.

"We found that while bullying within schools was close to the national average, outside of school, the level of street violence was much greater," says Katz.

For these young people, whose every day experience remains so far removed from the ideals of racial harmony, there seems little hope that multiracial youth projects can have much of an impact on their deeply entrenched suspicions.

"Young people often see these projects as window-dressing or superficial and totally at odds with what they experience on the street," says Katz. "You get the sense of moral indignation ratcheting up and that’s what leads to racial disharmony."

Katz urges a "more subtle and cohesive" approach to addressing racial tensions. This would involve schools staggering their home time so that everybody isn’t let out onto the streets together, school liaison officers to help increase the influence of parents, and inter-racial activities that go beyond the "usual sporting activities".

"We need more than just football teams. Putting on a play together might be a better way of bringing people together."

A number of such cross-cultural activities have been organised by Bradford Council’s youth service. One recent trip saw 100 young people from Bradford West being taken to see the hit film Bend It Like Beckham. Other events include a community leadership scheme concluding with a three-week expedition to Bolivia.

But perhaps the most ambitious undertaking was signalled by the release of those balloons in Manningham. This was to celebrate the launch of the Bradford-Keighley Youth Parliament, an initiative designed to give the young people of the Bradford more influence over their services.

According to Bradford Council’s youth issue co-ordinator, Norrina Rashid, the parliament will provide a forum for young people from a range of different ethnic and social backgrounds to discuss the issues that really matter to them.

Rashid hopes that the parliament, which holds its first elections on 24 September will prove to be a more effective way of encouraging young people to talk over their differences than some of the less subtle initiatives used in the past.

"I was there in the 1980s when we were bussing kids from one youth club across town to meet kids from another and hoping they would get on. What a fantastic idea that was. But this is not like that. The young people don’t feel like we are pushing them together and hopefully disaffected white kids will realise they have a lot in common with disaffected Asians."

¹ H Ousely, Community Pride Not Prejudice, 2001, from www.bradford.gov.uk  

² Commission for Racial Equality, A Place for us All, CRE, 2002, from www.cre.gov.uk

³ Young Voice, Thwarted Dreams, 2002, from www.young-voice.org