Citywise featured in Leader Magazine's Winter Edition 2025

Earlier this week, Citywise Education featured in the renowned Leader Magazine's

new Winter edition! Take a look of what the article says about Citywise!

"While the work Citywise does to address educational disadvantage in under served communities is simple, it can often be hard to explain or categorise. Our mission is ‘to strengthen communities through youth education, by working with the whole person

to support academic and personal development’. In short, we directly support young people on their educational journeys.   

If you were to observe our programmes, some individual elements would be

recognisable to anyone familiar with the scouts, coder dojos or indeed the local

GAA club. What makes Citywise Education special is the bringing together of a

number of elements into what we call ‘The Citywise Way’. We encourage young

people to aim high and we provide them with the means to succeed. We have year

round contact with our members, up to fifty weeks in the year. We encourage members to take age appropriate responsibility for the programmes in which they participate.

This includes simple things like tidying equipment, helping younger children with their homework or volunteering at summer camps and with year-round academic or youth activities. This leadership training opens eyes to personal responsibility for their own academic work, as well as growing future community leaders.

Our work starts from third class (or later) right up to Third level, keeping young people involved and interested in their education, acting as a constant backdrop to their lives, as they transition through the education system. And most importantly, all Citywise programmes, even the fun ones, contain academic and/or personal development components, while also broadening the interests of our members. Education is in everything we do. Words like holistic or child-centred can be used to describe what we have been doing quietly for three decades. The first Citywise programmes took place in Dublin’s inner city in the early 1990s, and iterative changes have led to the work we do at local level to support the education system. 

The majority of our work is currently focussed on Jobstown, Tallaght, in west Dublin, a pocket of educational disadvantage and social deprivation. Despite Ireland probably being the most educated country in the world, only 7% of the local community hold a degree. Similarly, in the context of full employment, some local areas have unemployment rates as high as 30%. Citywise builds on the great work already being done in local schools, augmenting the supports available to young people. It also provides services directly to these primary and secondary schools.

Our very successful CS Makers programme has supported local primary school classes by delivering computer science, engineering, 3D printing and virtual reality lessons in our cutting-edge STEAMSquare space in Jobstown. We provide state of the art equipment and trainers allowing schools make use of our specialised expertise and also free up valuable teacher time.  

Bridge to College is a two-week, fulltime TY programme which we run in conjunction

with Trinity Access Programmes which provides 256 Transition Year students with

project- based learning that replicates what it’s like to be a student in Third-level

education. Some young people who first engage with Citywise through such

activities with their schools may go on to take part on a voluntary membership basis

in after-school programmes. 

Jessica first came to Citywise when she was 8 years old for a summer camp,

following in the footsteps of her two older brothers. She spent her camp week playing sports, completing art projects and attending a taster course in robotics. From there

she came back in September to join one of our STEAM programmes. Some older

students who helped deliver that programme served Jessica as role models,

encouraging her to dream big. As she grew older, Jessica enrolled in Citywise’s Fast

Track Academy, taking part in weekly academic classes as well as receiving help to

study and mentorship support. Jessica is now a qualified engineer, leading teams

in building major pharmaceutical facilities around the world. Citywise opened her

eyes, providing her with her first opportunity to explore Science and Engineering.

Her voluntary teachers in Citywise helped her achieve the necessary grades through additional classes, but also by providing the encouragement and support to believe

that such success was possible.  

Jessica’s story is but one of many. 500 young people regularly take part in Citywise

activities. Internal and external evaluations, including a social return on

investment (SROI) study conducted by the UNESCO Centre for Children and

Young People, testify to success. Every €1 given to Citywise contributes €12.60 in

terms of social return.

Citywise is now working with other communities in sharing that success, either by

directly delivering programmes or supporting other organisations to do so. Next up

for Citywise is the development of a Climate, Science and Language Centre,

alongside the existing building in Jobstown. This will help address the new curriculum challenges particularly in the Sciences at secondary level and languages at primary

level – as well as supporting our ambition to reach 800 young people weekly. This

major capital project will be whole-life-net-zero carbon and one of the first of its

kind in Ireland. This promises to be a world class project for world class people,

showing that you can have the best of the best in Tallaght as much as any other

community."