SBTV FOUNDER Jamal Edwards has opened a number of youth centres to provide children in London with somewhere safe to go after school.

As part of the initiative, Edwards will support four youth centres across Acton, west London, where he grew up. 

He told BBC Newsround: “For me it’s really important. Just having a safe space to go to outside of school and your home. And a lot of the centres have been closed down so if I can try and help and I had a youth centre when I was younger, I want to try and set these kids up to have the best possible start that they can have.”

After securing funding from tech giant Google and the Wellcome Trust, Edwards was able to launch the youth project that has seen more than 170 young people engage in the project since it began 20 weeks ago.

Sharing the news on Instagram last week, Edwards said he refrained from doing interviews about the project until “the right time”.

The 29-year-old is a firm believer in the importance of young people having safe spaces to come together and create, having benefited personally benefited from them. Edwards attended a youth centre as a teenager where he participated in a film course, he later went on to help put some of the biggest names in UK music into the spotlight through his platform SBTV.

In May, the all-party parliamentary group on knife crime found that areas that had experienced the highest cuts to youth services saw bigger increases in knife crime. 

Some local authorities had reduced their spending on the services that cover youth clubs and youth workers by 91 per cent.

Speaking at the time, Labour MP Sarah Jones, chair of the APPG on knife crime, said: “We cannot hope to turn around the knife crime epidemic if we don’t invest in our young people. Every time I speak to young people they say the same thing: they need more positive activities, safe spaces to spend time with friends and programmes to help them grow and develop.”

Edwards said that while it can be said that there are links between the closure of youth clubs and the rise in youth violence, he is focused on doing something positive and helping young people towards a better path in life.