Well what a 2021 we have had!

We have been having so much fun with young people from across 3 local housing estates – Kingswood, St Hugh’s and Central Hill, with weekly creative mentoring workshops delivered by the amazing Temujin and Sunanda from Grounded Movement, leading to some incredible performances by these talented young people. Our Spirit of the Estate project is all about supporting young people’s resilience and confidence through creative opportunities which is needed more than ever during the pandemic.

We kicked off with launch events on each estate in early July to meet and engage with you people on the estates, giving them a taster of what they could do with our artists – Temujin, Sunanda, the Grounded UK dancers, DJ DBO, ADee our urban artist and Callum our podcast training workshop leader.

Weekly creative mentoring workshops followed with Temujin and Sunanda with dance and spoken word pieces being developed with each group. These were lots of fun with the young people who attended getting a chance to develop their own work for performance.

Performances at the community events

On the weekend of 20, 21 and 22 August we held 3 community events at each estate which featured live art from ADee, incredible performances from Grounded UK, our MC Bgirl SunSun and Temujin and of course our young performers. They did so well with most of them performing for the very first time in front of an audience. Local residents came along to enjoy the performances and they were very joyful events – the rain just about stayed away!

South Facing Festival

We are so proud of our young performers, 10 of whom stepped up to perform on the very big stage at South Facing Festival on 26 August with Grounded Movement and Grounded UK dancers in the Spirit of the Estate Jam – what an amazing evening for everyone! Lucy one of our young performers aged 12 said “After performing, I felt so much more confident about performing in front of people not just music/rapping but also acting and generally being less shy.” We are so proud of our young performers!

 

Spirit of the Estate Jam photo © Neil Stills-Scott

Urban art workshops

More young people went to the next part of the project to co-design and paint a mural with our workshop leader ADee on each  estate. This was a wonderful creative process where the young people loved being able to design their own ideas and then bring them to life on the murals. Paige aged 12 said “I most enjoyed expressing myself and being able to design all my ideas and show ADee all of my skills”

 

Photo: Mural on Kingswood estate

Podcasting workshops

The final part of the project was podcasting workshops for young people where they were mentored by Callum Hughes our lead facilitator and guest podcasters to create and edit their very own podcast on a topic of their choosing. We were blown away by the young people’s creativity and ideas. Andrew one of our guest podcasters said “I enjoyed working on this project immensely, finding the young people both bright and engaged, and ready to soak up the story of my journey to podcasting and the lessons I’ve learned. They seemed enthused and excited to go on and produce podcasts, and I was impressed with the variety of topics they had chosen – clearly a result of their passion for the subjects.”

We hope to share the final podcasts with you very soon on our social media channels.

We are now evaluating the project and approaching new funders to continue this really important work – Alijca one of their parents said “I couldn’t be more grateful for this opportunity, especially after lockdowns etc. It was a tricky time for children and it was great to see him get so excited and smiling with his eyes again.” 

If you would like to support our continuing work with young people, please do consider making a monthly donation – you can do this by clicking on Donate at the top of this page. Many thanks!

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