NEWS! Arts Council funds Shake's major programme!

Great news at Shake! 

ACE funded the pilot, and have now
come through for the major programme

With the Arts Council coming up with a major grant of £57,000, we are 50% towards our funding target to roll Shake! out at two London centres over three years. We'll be working intensively with 150 young people, 75 artists in training, 300 policy-makers, and gazillions of audience through our social media comms campaigns, online and live youth-made films, performances, publications and policy-changing documents.

After Shake's pilot project which started August 2010 at Stephen Lawrence Centre, we knew we had to do this again and do it BIG. So, after gathering a lot of ideas and feedback from everyone involved in the project, the team worked up a three-year programme. This involves doing two Shake! intensive courses a year, each with their own Continuity Programmes of mentoring and support work, based at Stephen Lawrence Centre and at exciting new partner Bernie Grant Arts Centre (Tottenham).

more great youth, arts and activism projects this summer

Organised by Apples and Snakes.

SHAKE THE DUST - the National Youth Poetry Slam final, (featuring Yorkshire heat-winners coached by Shake's own poet-mentor extraordinaire Sai Murray), is happening Saturday 7th July, 2 - 5pm, in London's Southbank Centre, supported by some fantastic events in the run-up.

Our Sai is performing on the Friday 6pm, as one of the 9 winning poet coaches from the UK-wide regional finals. Leeds Young Authors Artistic Director and dynamic poet-activist Khadijah Ibrahiim who we worked with on our 2011 event Britain on Trial is one of the judges...

There's a free screening of the award-winning film "We Are Poets" featuring a year in the lives of a group of Leeds Young Authors as they make their way through heat after heat to be selected to represent the UK in the internationally heralded Brave New Voices festival in the USA. Wonderful, inspirational. That's on Thursday 6th July, Queen Elizabeth Hall foyer, 6.15pm

Get over there for one or more of the great events. See whole programme here.

Youth, arts, & activism events everywhere this summer

There are loads of interesting projects coming up so I thought I'd pull some of them together in a few blogs...

It's still not too late to do this amazing project...

'So We Stand' - the dynamic popular education collective - are organising a Summer School in Community Organising and Social Justice. 7th - 14th July, London. Check out their launch event 'Reclaiming the Riots, 1 year on' here, happening this Thursday at George Padmore Institute, Finsbury Park.

And find out about the whole summer school and application process here! Get that application in by 2nd July. They want to make this an annual thing so you have a real chance not only to learn but to influence the way the whole project develops.

Zena Edwards in new video documentary on 'riots'

Check out a taster of this critical new film coming out soon, this one featuring Zena Edwards.

To follow what's happening with the film VoiceOver: Riots Reframed, go here.
They write: ‘VoiceOver: Riots Reframed’ is an independent documentary aimed at countering mainstream discourse on last year’s riots and riots that occur in poor, racialised and marginalised communities generally. Dominant media has towed the government line that August’s riots were about “criminality, pure and simple..."


Young people from Shake! worked with facilitators Ed Lewis, Simon Murray and Zena for their sell-out session "The Unheard" at the Rebellious Media Conference last year, and at the natonal Shake! event "Britain on Trial" in Leeds. Zena is involved in several youth initiatives combatting stereotypical, biased and racist responses to the uprisings.

Soul-food - what I savoured from the Remembrance Service for Stephen Lawrence

I sat, moved, with 200 others in a church in central London yesterday. It was a service of remembrance for Stephen Lawrence, in the year two of his accused murderers were finally convicted, 19 years after his death. It made me think a lot about how we sustain ourselves in long struggles for justice. It made me think about the work of Shake! and also Platform's campaigns on issues in the Niger Delta about London-based oil company Shell and environmental racism. Here is what I wrote. 

Videos of Shake! at Rebellious Media Conference

Those good people at RMC have now put up a great compilation of videos from Shake's session "The Unheard: Youth, 'the riots' and the media" at the 2011 conference in London.

Watch recordings from the session itself, plus interviews and poetry performed by Rotimi, Samia, Selina and Kadish (Leeds Young Authors).

 

Also watch interviews with Shake! poet-facilitators Sai and Zena from Ceasefire magazine's Adam Elliot-Cooper over on our videos page.

We had more good news from RMC organiser Gabriel Carlyle recently. He told us that once they'd digested all the written evaluation forms, Shake's session got the most number of glowing reviews. People were energised by hearing directly and unmediated from young people, and they loved the structure (a mix of poetry, commentary, and discussion).

This was the fruit of all that brilliant planning from the team: Selina, Samia, Ed, Sai, Rotimi, Jane. And big thanks to Ed from New Left Project who kept the team cooking across 4 cities in the run-up...

Don't throw activist histories away: The Huntley Conference on Arts & Activism, Culture & Resistance

El Crisis

There were over a 100 artists, activists, community workers, young people, archivists & conservators, educators, parents, grandparents, policymakers......taking part in talks, creative "Groundings" sessions, a parallel youth conference, music & poetry performances, from the fabulous El Crisis, younger talented artists, and the more experienced......discussing race and power, creativity and resilience, protest and activism.....and feasting on delicious food from Jollofpot, book stalls, all in the great facilities of London Metropolitan Archives.

Eric and Jessica Huntley

What was brilliant and so rich about this day was we were learning about art, activism and Black struggle through the legacy and networks of the two activists Jessica and Eric Huntley, now in their 80s, who arrived in London from Guyana in the late 1960s.