JAMIE Green has admitted it was an immense feeling to have won the Youth Engagement Project of the Year award with Swipe and YES – Jubilee River Project.

The project has secured £160,000 of funds to create a new community watersports facility on the unused Jubilee River.

It is still in its early days but has already engaged with more than 150 participants. It is the first of its kind within the borough and offers free coached rowing and canoeing for schools, colleges and groups.

Swipe has developed an excellent relationship with British Rowing and British Canoeing, and has been successful with a national Sportivate Innovation project bid of £34,000.

The project itself is also developing volunteer coaches who will support groups to come back time and time again.

Green, Swipe director and YES chairman, said: “We have been working on this project for some time and are over the moon. We only got it up and running in 2015 so the fact that a new project like this is getting an award is immense to us.

“We have been looking at the project for a number of years and it has taken a long time to get it together because it involves putting up a building, which is a tough ask.

“You have to go through planning permission and all that kind of stuff and, once the building was down, you have got to get young people involved.

“It was quite an immense project to start with but now that it’s there, it is fantastic to run and getting people on the water, enjoying the river.”

He added: “We have got a whole river here and more space to build on if we need to.

“We just more people contacting us about the project, which I think is fantastic.

“It is interesting the amount of people who didn’t realise we had a river in Slough and are now coming down and using it, taking advantage of it.”