Steve Barnabis was 11 years old when he visited his grandmother in Jamaica and accompanied her as she performed her charity work. They stayed and helped at an orphanage, which had been badly damaged by a hurricane. Barnabis experienced what it was like to sleep nine to a room. He saw extreme poverty at first hand.
Reflecting on that early experience, he says it gave him a sense that there was a bigger world than himself.
He’s carried that belief through his life and turned it into actions.
“I’ve always had a feeling that it’s better to help someone else. When you help someone else your own problems suddenly don’t seem so bad,” says Barnabis, 49.
Today he runs Project Zero, a youth centre in Walthamstow, which he set up in 2019 to keep young people off the streets. But his whole life has been devoted to service to others and to his community.
In his 20s, after studying drama, he travelled to America where he worked with young people in gangs, using drama techniques to help them with anger management. He’s worked in residential children’s homes, children’s hospices and with youth offending teams. He’s also fostered children; his first when he was just 24.
For 13 years prior to securing the funding for Project Zero, he was running another centre in the area. “We’ve applied all our skills and knowhow to Project Zero,” he says. Having lost two cousins to knife crime, one in 2004 and another in 2019, he knows only too well the problems so many young people face in our cities today. He is committed to reducing the level of violent crime in his community.
His work doesn’t stop there. During the pandemic he provided vulnerable families with access to resources, including food and toiletries, and sourced laptops to keep kids learning during the long lockdowns.
In recognition of his long career of service to the community, he’s been nominated for the Royal Voluntary Service’s Platinum Champions Awards, which was launched this week.
Barnabas was nominated by the Eden Project, for whom he did the Big Walk from Morecambe to London in 2018, stopping at community projects along the way.
“It does feel nice, the recognition,” he says. But not for simply his own sake. “It means people understand the work, but also spreads the word. It means someone else will get in touch to volunteer or donate.”
The awards have been announced in honour of Royal Voluntary Service patron, the Queen, and the example she has set in her record-breaking 70 years of service. Together with the charity’s president, the Duchess of Cornwall, and in partnership with the Big Jubilee Lunch, the awards will celebrate outstanding volunteers across the country who are making a difference every day.
