Whether it's stewarding at a festival, writing for a magazine, or producing works of art, volunteering for creative projects is bound to get those juices flowing.

All | Carl | Catherine | Rhiannon | Mei | Gaby | Enlight Youth Group | Centrepoint

Tuesday May 11, 2010

What does he know?

It's been three weeks since Rolling Sound started their music and digital workshops at Wilton, and although I have missed one week, I'm feeling part of the team and closer to the kids already.
I thought it would be helpful to set the scene of the youth club, since people reading this might find it hard to picture. Basically, the estate is only three-storeys high and is a square of flats with a big quad in the middle. The youth club sits in the centre, with a football pitch, basket ball courts and community gardens around it. It has bright patterns and pictures pained on some of the walls and gaps are filled with flower-beds (tended to by the residents). It's not at all the depressing high-rise estate so often depicted on tv.

Inside the centre, there are a few small rooms with one bigger in the middle. This is where Rolling Sound set up their equipment - laptops connected to small keyboards for music making, laptops for film editing, and small hand-held cameras for filming.

I've started cycling to Wilton which gets me there much quicker after work. When I arrive, I help set-up and chat to the others. Sheila gets the tea out, which is a life-saver after a full-day's work. The other volunteers have a lot of experience working with young people and are generally more relaxed and confident with the kids than I am. Many of them work at other youth centres, schools and community projects and they know what the kids are interested in. Although I work in a young person's charity, I work in the media and PR team, so my expertise is really in press and writing. I'm also used to working with people aged 16 plus, so my conversation topics are not exactly suited to ten-year-olds. And I definitely need to work on my discipline - I just find some of the things they say so funny that I forget to tell them when they've done something wrong. But I think I'm getting better.

Tonight, about ten people came along and the centre was alive with young people making music, playing the drums, editing film they'd shot in previous weeks, and designing logos for the films. I really had alot of fun. I spent some of the evening drawing and chatting to the young boys about school and how keeping your bedroom tidy is a real pain. Also about Facebook - which they're all on (it's complete rubbish that Facebook claims it's for over 13-year-olds). Some of the boys can draw really well and stay concentrating for the whole two hours.

I tried to help them with the music editing software, but honestly, I don't know how it works. In the end I got one of the girls to show me - she's only about ten. It amazes me that they all use these programmes at home and are making music from such a young age. I imagine what the music scene will be like in the future with everyone able to produce their own tracks - it's going to be brilliant.

It was such a great feeling that people stayed longer than they were meant to. We had to ask people to leave, whereas in the first week, numbers had fizzled out before 8pm. But truthfully I'm still a very long way from understanding what's going on. There have been some more incidents at the estate in the last couple of weeks, and the police were in today. I think they were there mostly to try and be friendly, but I couldn't help feeling that these evenings that feel so free and fun are often tempered by less pleasant events.

One of the members of Rolling Sound had a particularly bad experience with some pupils at the school where he teaches today. I won't go into details, but it involved knives and gangs - all the terms you hear bandied about by the media. Except today, a terrible and unthinkable incident really happened to him and he seemed quite shaken up. It made me think - who are we who say we understand these problems? I work for a young people's charity and I think I know what I'm talking about, but really, I don't. People like him and the others who work with young people - they know. Only they could really describe how deep these problems are, but even they can't suggest a solution. And if they can't, who can?

I think it's fitting I'm having these thoughts on the day when David Cameron has walked into Number 10 as our new prime minister. What does he know? I'd like to see him really face these issues.

Posted by GabyJ ( 10:00 PM )
Link to this post Comments[1]