Youth Work Week: Celebrating Inclusion and the Art of Youth Work

Throughout the week we’ll be sharing stories to celebrate the positive difference the Youth Investment Fund is making to young people’s lives, creating spaces that are accessible to all and reaching more young people in local communities. Youth Work Week is run by National Youth Agency, our friends and Youth Investment Business delivery partner.

As part of this year’s campaign, National Youth Agency launched an Art of Youth Work campaign to encourage young to create a piece of original music, dance, spoken word or visual art which brings to life how their youth club or provision provides a safe and inclusive space where they can discover their talents, celebrate their identity and feel connected within their communities.

We’ll be celebrating diversity and inclusion and showing how youth work inspires creativity through dance, poetry, music, film, visual art and so much more. The Youth Investment Fund is not only helping youth services to modernise their spaces and build new youth hubs, but it’s also enabling so many services to improve their reach and accessibility and enabling more open access spaces right across England.

Gosforth Civic Theatre

Gosforth Civic Theatre is an inclusive and creative space for young people. Gosforth Civic Theatre has a bold ambition to raise everyone’s expectations about what people with learning disabilities can achieve.

Last year a Youth Investment Fund grant enabled their theatre to have a transformational renovation, making the space more accessible, sustainable and creating some amazing new features. They offer young people gaming, dance, drama and arts activities in their arts venue and cafe in Gosforth, Newcastle. It’s a truly inclusive space for young people in the heart of the community. Gosforth Civic Theatre is changing young people’s lives. They love the new space, and say it’s a space to be creative, make friends, express yourself and have fun.

“It’s the place that’s making my dreams come true.”

“Getting out of the house and doing something encouraging like singing or dancing is good for you and your mental health.”

Sunderland Home Grown

Sunderland Home Grown is a rich environment designed to help young people and adults with learning disabilities and mental health problems thrive and enjoy life by creating training and employment opportunities as well as promoting social and therapeutic horticulture. It’s an idyllic space to get creative in the great outdoors and enjoy growing flowers, fruit and vegetables.

A Youth Investment Fund grant enabled Sunderland Homegrown to extend their space and make it more accessible to young people. Prior to the funding the site couldn’t easily support young people using a wheelchair.

Sunderland Home Grown can now welcome around 50 young people every week, helping them to learn new skills for life and work, and have fun in the outdoors. And this year, the team at Sunderland Home Grown has produced over 300,000 plants!

Brighton Youth Centre

A Youth Investment Fund grant is transforming Brighton Youth Centre and will make it accessible to all young people. It’s an open access youth space that values diversity and inclusion. Music, art and drama are at the heart of their work, helping young people to explore their identity, and find a voice.

Lylli Morton is one of the young people who enjoyed Brighton Youth Centre, helping Lylli’s journey to become a musician.

“BYC started my growth into becoming a musician and figuring out what career path I wanted to go down, also being there helped me create the friends I have now.”

“I was just starting to delve into music, and I just started to play ukulele and stuff like that, but I got the opportunity from BYC to start gigging and here I am now, at a music university getting my degree, and if it wasn’t for that one night when I was 12 getting onstage with a uke, I probably wouldn’t be here right now. I’d probably be doing business or something boring, something that isn’t really an aspiration of mine.”

 

Chichester Shed

The Youth Investment Fund has given young people in a deprived part of Chichester a brand-new youth hub. The Shed is the first dedicated youth space in the local area, giving young people open access to a creative space.

The new Chichester Shed has an open access youth offer in the evenings and throughout the holidays, giving young people a space to relax, gain confidence and new skills, and take part in engaging activities. There’s even a graffiti wall space to help young people express how they are feeling.

And it’s a space that will also connect young people with the outdoors. It overlooks their community gardens and the local cricket green, and young people can enjoy using a new fire pit and outdoor space to experience the feeling of camping and connecting with nature. The space offers a whole range of creative activities, including enabling young people to express themselves through music and performance.

The Shed also bring generations together to share creative skills. The idea is to enable older “shedders” to share their shed skills with young people – things like wood and metal work, electronics, and other life skills. By bringing generations together it will help everyone to connect with others face to face; creating a space where ‘shedders’ engage with each other ‘shoulder to shoulder’ as a more manageable means of socialising, learning, and collaborating.

KBSK Bodmin

KBSK CIC, a local youth and dance space in Bodmin, opened its brand-new youth centre in September, funded by the #YouthInvestmentFund. They offer young people amazing opportunities to express themselves and flourish through the arts. Their work is a real celebration of dance and performance.

KBSK CIC’s work focuses on improving both mental and physical wellbeing, combating antisocial behaviour, and acting as a vital early intervention for the youth in the area. The new youth centre will serve as the permanent home for KBSK’s current projects while enabling the organisation to expand its services, reaching more children and young people in Bodmin and giving them every opportunity to get creative, enjoy dance and youth-based activities, as well as offering holistic support for their families.

The Cresset, Peterborough

Every year The Cresset supports 2,000 young people through their performing arts programmes in Peterborough. A Youth Investment Fund grant means they reach even more young people, giving them opportunities to express themselves through dance and theatre.

Young people have amazing opportunities to sing, dance, act and perform to a live audience at their theatre space. The funding means that they can make their space open to everyone, including upgrading theatre seating, installing an accessible dressing room and a stage lift to allow accessible performance opportunities. The Cresset is working with young people on a new programme of youth work to create activities and opportunities for them to participate and gain skills, confidence, and learning.

Most importantly the funding means that The Cresset can opens the doors to a whole new set of young people that they haven’t worked with before and will ensure its long-term future.