COVID 19 Series: Listening to and Learning from Element Young Creatives
Our final dispatch from lockdown time hears from Element Young Creatives and their experiences of engaging with our virtual offer over the past few months. We will also be reflecting on how the Element executive team has been learning from Element Young Creatives about what is important to them, specifically when considering the Black Lives Matter movement and the role that the creative arts can play in processing, expressing and protesting systemic racism in the UK.
We’ve collected feedback at different points throughout the pandemic to see where Element Young Creatives are at. All of these have been useful to capture, so that we can continue to creatively support in the most relevant way possible. Over to them!
On Virtual Drop-In
“We’ve come together as a community in hard times and kept each other happy. We’ve learned new things and heard everyone’s opinions on what they feel and how they interpret art”
“Everyone shares ideas, everyone has fun”
On #CreateDaily challenges
“It’s so nice for me to see things happening on the Whatsapp groups. Even when I don’t contribute each day, it feels good to be part of a group”
“I think the daily creative challenge has been really interesting and entertaining”
On Culture Club
“It gives you an experience - if you do Culture Club, you can understand and make friends and make peace”
“It’s chill but you can educate yourself and learn something different”
“You can connect with each other through the things we’ve all watched or listened to or read”
Now that things seem to be easing, what’s the deal for the next few months?
Whilst things look like they’re moving forward, the Element team are aware that as a global community, we are still very much within the pandemic. This is not the end of the crisis, but rather a new stage within it. As such, we will continue to request the thoughts, opinions, and experiences of our network, to ensure that our next moves are in line with the young people that we work with. As such, here are the current changes that have been discussed and planned:
Virtual drop-in goes physical
All being well and within the NYA’s guidelines, we will be starting up our fortnightly, physical creative drop-in sessions from the end of September onwards. Whilst maintaining the informal space of these drop-ins, we will be adding a new level of pre-planning, where Element Young Creatives will need to sign up to the drop-in to ensure that we have an appropriate number of people in our office at any given time. We have heard from some Element Young Creatives that the virtual drop-in has in fact been easier for them: be it because of childcare; their mental wellbeing; or simply their preference. Because of this, every other week we will be continuing our virtual drop-in sessions.
Blended projects
We have just completed a full round of blended projects, where two new groups of Element Young Creatives have met both online on virtual sessions, and in person, either in a large garden space, or in a super-airy meeting room in our offices. We tailored our content to ensure the online space had activities that everyone could participate in from their own rooms (sending out our creative bundles pre-project helped with that, too!); and the in-person sessions required small amounts of shared arts materials with large amounts of creativity. Feedback from the projects has been positive, with one young person telling us, “I had a wonderful time with you guys”, another commenting, “I have never enjoyed drawing and art stuff but once I started Element I realised I can do something. I was surprised when I saw the outcome of my work”.
Culture Club 2.0: Black Lives Matter; Black Culture Matters
Our online Culture Club began at the same time as the world became aware of the appalling police brutality that was taking Black lives in America, and the wider scar of racism across the world. Often, the piece of art that we were discussing in Culture Club was overtly or subtly related to the damage that racism, violence, and discrimination has on all levels within society. In Ava DuVernay’s Selma, Element Young Creatives remarked on a story that evoked both inspiration and hope in remarkable individuals, and frustration and disappointment in how little seems to have changed since the 1960s. In Roger Robinson’s A Portable Paradise poetry collection, the group discussed the concept of “paradise”: what part of society feels entitled to it; and who else has to work much harder to find it and hold onto it. In Pizza Shop Heroes, Element Young Creatives watched a group of young men who had risked their lives to come to the UK, only to find significant parts of their experience establishing a home for themselves here shaped by hostility and rejection.
These conversations are important, and engaging in art that provokes these conversations is very much aligned with Element’s way of working. And so, it was not a giant leap to turn our weekly, online Culture Club into a longer-form, monthly and (hopefully!) in-person Culture Club 2.0, where the Element team and Element Young Creatives discuss work that has been created by underrepresented communities within the dominant art sphere, and how to build an actively anti-racist world. By “world”, we mean both within the grand, sweeping, all-encompassing sense of the word, but also within the much more immediate “world” of Element: as an organisation, we are seriously reflecting on the fact that our 3-person executive team of white women does not accurately represent the diverse groups of young people we work with. We will be using Culture Club 2.0 as a space to innovate and collaborate with our network, thinking and working together to ensure that when we scale-up our team with new roles and freelance artistic facilitators, diversity of experiences and voices is paramount. Alongside guest facilitators from a wide range of artistic disciplines and social and cultural backgrounds, we hope to create a space with Culture Club 2.0 in which Element Young Creatives can take the lead in these discussions; and where all together we create Element’s anti-racism policy for current and future participants and staff members to proactively enact.
Our first Culture Club 2.0 session will be next month, and we will be joined by the brilliant writer, producer, poet and actor Bashiie Baptiste, who is currently producing the #WillYouListenNow festival: an audio-visual commissioning festival, aiming to support and platform 12 Black and Brown Artists to speak to their experiences of racism in the UK. Bashiie and her team are currently crowdfunding for this, check out and donate if you can here. In Element’s inaugural Culture Club 2.0, Bashiie will support Element Young Creatives to form the space as their own, in a way that feels most relevant and important to the group. We will update our blog on what comes out of this initial, exploratory session once it has happened.
The Element team has internally set up a co-operative inquiry group, where we meet monthly to share literature around racism in the UK; to hold each other to account in our approaches to working with young people and engaging with and learning from their experiences; and to work together on how best to bring an embedded culture of inclusivity into Element.
Black Lives Matter has brought even greater attention to just how much we must do as a world, a nation, a sector, and an organisation, to tackle racism. This is not a quick-fix; it is a long-haul. We are committed to learning, sharing, understanding, and growing as an Element team supporting a network of Young Creatives. Get in touch if you’d like to hear more, share more, tell us more, or question our approach. Our ears and our eyes are open.