Howard Jones: As for getting Young People involved, this is a problem faced by clubs in most fields (with the possible exception of organised sports) and doesn't just affect folk clubs. Young People today don't seem to be much interested in clubs, they have different ways of meeting up. In particular they aren't very interested in joining in with people old enough to be their parents or even grandparents.

Yes and no. Yes, young people are indeed "not much interested in clubs" in the traditional sense. As you rightly say, there are other ways of meeting up or arranging things now than pre-arranging a monthly or fortnightly meeting in a pub or a coffee shop.

But it's not true that they're not interested in joining in with older people.

My climbing club was moribund until we moved away from "physical" meetings to organise trips. We'd had a website since the late 1990s, and an email contact list, but the demographic was still ageing at about a year per year until we really started making an effort to use Facebook AND "WhatsApp" as a means of organising meetings and trips away. We now have a very healthy mix of young people and older ones attending meets....the only criterion of whether youngsters and oldsters "mix" being the oldsters' willingness to embrace new technology. ie, those who won't use "WhatsApp" are by definition now excluding THEMSELVES from 90% of the club's activities.

It's the same on the music side. When I go to local venues normally populated by younger people, I'm invariably made welcome. People talk to me, and are interested in why more older people don't go along. Conversely, when I used to take younger people along to local folk clubs and sessions in my home town (and I made a very concerted effort for 3-4 years) they generally felt excluded/ unwelcome and rarely came back.