Helen lured home by the call of Mahdlo

MAHDLO chief executive Helen Taylor: “I want people to feel proud of Mahdlo”

MARTYN MEETS... Helen Taylor, Chief Executive of Oldham’s new youth zone, Mahdlo
ALL roads lead to Oldham for Helen Taylor... and those trails include treks in faraway reaches of the planet.

I’m talking about Patagonia, Costa Rica, Zanzibar, the rural hinterland of West Bengal. All are places where the chief executive of Mahdlo, the iconic Oldham Youth Zone, has spent time.

She funded the first of her trips, after finishing her degree, by working as a checkout assistant at the Tesco at Hill Stores.

Helen worked at the little Tesco, before the humongous superstore took root in Huddersfield Road.

“Wasn’t it called Hillards then?” I asked, impishly, even though Helen, at 37, seems far too young to remember those days.

A ready smile creases her countenance as she bats away my question with the accomplished ease of one who’s been there, done it and probably produced the T-shirt, never mind worn it.

For right here in our midst we have a woman who can relate to her role in charge of the £5 million development in our town centre which is helping transform the social lives of hundreds of young Oldhamers.

In addition to spending much of her previous life travelling the world — did I mention Nepal and Mongolia? — Helen has worked in, er, Longsight with inner-city groups, establishing play areas, parks and community gardens.

Add to that her time as an unpaid worker with Groundwork Trust, when she returned from travelling in India, Australia and Brunei, throw on to the impressive CV time as a volunteer teacher for young deaf children in Kolkata (Calcutta), and it is little wonder she beat a host of candidates to land her dream job.

“I was so excited when I took the call to say I had got the job. I was ecstatic... it was something I really badly, madly wanted. I wanted to be a part of this so much.”

That infectious enthusiasm has clearly not left this former Hulme Grammar School pupil who was pointed towards the post by father, Leslie, who spotted the ad in the Chronicle.

“I had my first interview with Gerry Glover — he’s the chief executive of the OnSide charity — and I was simply inspired. I was just amazed that so many people wanted this to work, that so many people had promised funds to make it happen.

“They were committing to something that was just a dream. It was fantastic.”

That commitment has resulted in Helen almost settling down, almost.

She still wants to see the few bits of the world she has so far missed — but is fully committed to Mahdlo.

“We are building something here and people are responding from all walks of life. From the patrons and sponsors to the volunteers to the young people who are making the most of these outstanding facilities.”

On the opening night, Helen and the team stood wide eyed as the queues stretched down Egerton Street, hundreds of smiling young faces eager to see for themselves what the older generation had produced on their behalf.

What they found was a simply stunning building, totally fit for purpose, which has already become a second home to hundreds of Oldham’s younger generation.

“We have some who have been here every evening since we opened and that’s fine, that’s why we are here. Others come and go but we have never had fewer than 150 on any opening, and that is quite remarkable.

“In terms of attendance, we are already on a par with Bolton Lads and Girls’ Club which has been open for many years and which has been the inspiration for places like Mahdlo.”

As the number of trained volunteers increases — there are more than 50 at the moment and many others in the midst of their five-week, one-night-a-week training courses — Helen is convinced that numbers will grow.

“We have health and safety issues and also quality is important. We don’t want to be in a situation whereby we have a building full of youngsters but no direction for many of them. We have to maintain staff-to-youngsters ratios.”

The building, says Helen, “absorbs” people and even on the busiest of evenings — the best attendance to date has been circa 350 — the centre doesn’t look too full.

“There are so many rooms, so many activities, so much going on . . . it’s just fantastic to see.”

“Fantastic” is one of Helen’s favourite words, though I doubt she will thank me for telling everyone.

But I came away from our time together with the distinct impression that Oldham has unearthed a hidden gem. Here we have a girl from an Oldham family, she has two bothers and hugely supportive parents, educated in Scouthead and, as I mentioned earlier, at Hulme.

She left the grammar school with plenty of qualifications for university life in Newcastle where she read geography before setting off on the first of her many trips.

Returning home — “I love travelling, I really do, but I also get homesick and always want to come back to Oldham” she confessed — to complete her masters degree Helen found herself marooned in the Orkneys reading for her MSc in marine resource management.

“It was simply a mistake, I thought I was applying for Edinburgh but 15 of us were sent off to the Orkneys. It was always dark, bleak and so far away so I managed to get myself an overseas posting to write my dissertation.”

That posting was on a tiny speck in the Caribbean Sea, off the coast of Nicaragua, barely discernible in my atlas but called Isla de Providencia, part of Colombia.

Three months later and the intrepid Helen, dissertation complete, was not going to waste this opportunity and off she trekked, this time to “look around” Central America, meeting friends to take in Mexico, Costa Rica and Guatemala.

She made it sound as if you and I were looking around Rochdale. But, as I said earlier, for all her globetrotting, Helen is a home bird at heart and Springhead was calling.

She couldn’t get a job but her father’s connections with Groundwork led her to a volunteer’s role and so her life in the public sector started.

Longsight kept her busy, but her head was elsewhere and soon she and a friend were off trekking once more, visiting Thailand, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, where she was “adopted” by a local family and saw real life in this secretive society.

With another friend she then spent time in Malaysia and Singapore, but her heart strings were pulling now for Helen had met the man who was to become her husband.

Matt Taylor was a climber, with whom Helen worked at the environmental charity Groundwork.

He returned home after spending some time with Helen in Indonesia — “we really had so little money we travelled on local transport everywhere and I remember on one occasion sleeping while covered in cockroaches and waking to find local people just standing and staring at us on this little ferry” — and Helen followed but only after spending a another month in New Zealand and time in Bolivia and Chile.

“I was missing him,” she shyly confessed. “I had planned to be away another three months but my money was running out anyway.”

The pair now live in Grotton and Matt works for a company manufacturing climbing walls.

“No, they didn’t win the contract for ours at Mahdlo, it had nothing to do with me” — and Matt will soon be volunteering one evening a week at the centre. Life with Mahdlo is all consuming.

Helen concluded: “It’s a privilege but I really feel responsible. I want people to feel proud of Mahdlo, it has such a great amount of support I don’t see how it can fail. This really is a golden opportunity for Oldham.”