A CASH-STRAPPED group which works to help young carers – has been saved by a second grant from Cambridgeshire County Council. The council s latest grant of £10,000 was announced on Wednesday at the annual general meeting of West Anglia Crossroads Caring f

A CASH-STRAPPED group which works to help young carers - has been saved by a second grant from Cambridgeshire County Council.

The council's latest grant of £10,000 was announced on Wednesday at the annual general meeting of West Anglia Crossroads Caring for Carers.

At the meeting, a group of young carers gave a presentation explaining how it felt to be a young person caring for someone else in the family - a parent or a brother or sister.

The youngsters performed a short play, which is being taken into schools to stop young carers being bullied or singled out. In the drama, a boy who torments a girl about someone in her family having depression, turns out to have a similar problem at home himself but is too embarrassed to admit it. Eventually, he stops taunting her and starts to offer some help.

There are an estimated 125,000 young carers in the UK and The Young Carers' Project of West Anglia Crossroads is a meeting point for some 280 young carers in Huntingdonshire.

The project had been funded with a three-year Lottery grant but this money ran out in March.

The project needs some £80,000 a year to run. It receives an annual £21,000 from Cambridgeshire County Council. The authority granted it an extra £10,000 to keep it afloat over the summer. This enabled the group to run one of its residential weekends for youngsters taking away 15 youngsters. In previous years, it had given 60 children a holiday. The new money will keep the project afloat for the rest of the financial year.

The charity has been obliged this summer to cut down on its activity groups and had said it would no longer be able to fund its one to one sessions for youngsters in crisis. Now these have been made safe over the winter.

The charity has applied for funding from another section of the Lottery but learned last month that it had been turned down. It was at that point that the county council stepped in with an extra £10,000.

Members of the charity had pointed out the contradiction of the council saying it had no funding to give the project when it had spent money on training social workers to spot young carers and refer them on to the project for help.