Making sure young voices are heard

22 May 2017

Last Wednesday 17 May we kicked off the latest round of Creativity Works - our employment programme that gets young Londoners better linked with industry. We run industry immersion days, workshops and live briefs that encourage communication, teamwork, applied research, pitches and everything in between.

The focus for this round is advertising, more specifically account management, planning and strategy, creative, and production. We are working with some amazing partners in Kati Russell (ex D&AD and founder of The Girlhood), D&AD, Commercial Break, Livity, Young Creative Council, Let’s Be Brief, FCB Inferno, Wieden + Kennedy, Grey London and many more.

Check the Create Jobs Instagram and website over the coming weeks to see what the participants are getting up to.

I’m blogging today because one of the course participants, Cellyn, came up to me over lunch to show me this blog she had made: http://cellyn.co.uk/registertovote. She had spent time over the weekend working on how she (and the group) could mobilise as many young people to be registered to vote by today’s deadline at 11.59pm, Monday 22 May 2017.

The work we had covered on the Wednesday prior, their induction day, put the wider 22 participants into smaller groups, and after an overview of the course’s intentions and getting to know each other, I presented two products to get the group thinking. The first was ID’s latest magazine that includes a feature by the photographer Tim Walker on London Now. The spread captures a number of young creatives, the people who are making interesting stuff happen. Walker documents gal dem, BBZ, POC, NTS and the individuals behind them (Liv Little, Nadine Davis and Tia Simon-Campbell, Crackstevens, Femi Adeyemi). The common link is diverse young London coming together to fill a gap, and make content that better represents their values and their interests. I wanted to show our group what’s happening on their doorstep.

Following the I-D chat, we moved to Peter Macfadyen’s Flatpack Democracy – a DIY guide to creating independent politics. In his short book, he describes the process of taking political power at a local level. He writes about the crisis in democracy in Great Britain and suggests it’s not the people who are the problem, but the systems and structures that are no longer fit for purpose.

By combining the I-D spread with the grassroots action piece, I tried to get the group thinking about their own interests, their own entertainment outlets but also their motivations – why they are here, what they want to achieve. What’s nice is that we’ve got our first participant in Cellyn who clearly wants her voice heard and is making strides to do just that.

If you haven’t registered to VOTE yet – then do so my midnight. Tick-Tock...

Picture credit: Emilie Dubois