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My story as a Creative Youth Voice Champion
In 2022, Curious Minds worked with seven early career professionals under the Kickstart scheme as Creative Youth Voice Champions.
The Creative Youth Voice Champions were deployed across four local cultural education partnerships (LCEPs) in the North West and were tasked with taking a creative approach to engaging children and young people’s voices in cultural education. To do this they delivered workshops in schools, planned, delivered and analysed youth voice surveys, and held consultation conversations with children and young people.In this short blog, one of these Creative Youth Voice Champions, Faisal, looks back on his placement - sharing his experiences and how he saw his work directly benefiting young people in Bolton.
A step into something new
I started my role as a Creative Youth Voice Champion in March 2022.Coming from working with young people within a sports background, I had no previous experience in the Arts sector, meaning I was quite nervous initially - not knowing how I was going to cope in a field of which I had no prior experience or knowledge.
Curious Minds and my Arts Advisor were both very supportive and helped me through the process of getting to know everything. I tried all different forms of Arts activities trying to find something that I enjoy doing but also comfortable and confident to lead an Arts Project on it.
Through my time in post, I did a lot of important and meaningful work with the Local Cultural Education Partnership (LCEP), attending all the meetings, discussing how we can improve youth engagement and the barriers that the young people face when it comes to participating in creative activities.
I carried out a local survey, for which I visited multiple community centres alongside running an online version, with the aim of finding out what stops young people from getting involved in Arts opportunities and the changes they’d like to see. I interviewed more than 80 young people and presented all the data back to the LCEP members.
Delivering with Arts Award
At the same time, I was working towards my Silver Arts Award qualification. I decided to lead a Graffiti Arts project on Knife Crime Awareness, which was completely youth led.Initially I would run an interactive awareness session; then the young people would create a piece of artwork related to Knife Crime Awareness. I held multiple sessions with young people from different communities and, to finish, we brought all the young people's artwork together to make the final design which would go on a wall. The young people were directly involved in spray painting the design onto the wall too!
The feedback from the project was great and young people really enjoyed it. They said they would love to continue doing creative activities on a regular basis.
A personal growth journey
My time with Curious Minds and the LCEP as a Creative Youth Voice Champion has been a really good experience.Personally, it was a period of growth. I gained a completely new set of skills in a field I never thought I’d be able to and massively improved my confidence. It opened so many doors of opportunity for me professionally. During the placement, I met a lot of people; networking and gaining connections.
My managers, supervisors and Arts Award Advisor were very supportive in helping me move forward in my career. I was able to access many more opportunities with to the skills and experiences I developed as a Creative Youth Voice Champion.
Since then, I have taken up a full-time role at Greater Manchester Youth Network, on a programme called Being Together. We work with unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, who are new to the country, running wellbeing sessions, offering 1-to-1 support, English classes, life in the UK sessions and much more. My Arts Advisor helped me a lot with finding the next opportunity and I'm proud to say I'm in this new role because of her support.
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