Archie's story
"I have realised you don’t have to just please other people, you have to also think of yourself."
discover more >Hi! My name is Stella, you might remember me from the social media takeover I did over the summer.
But if you don’t know me, hello! I have been on TMC’s youth board since April, so it’s going on 9 months now, but alongside that I am also a trustee at Creatives Now, a youth-led Arts collective based in Bolton, and I run my own blog, Local Gal, where I write about anything and everything creative! But today I’m taking over the blog (once again!) to share my experience about Ignite Creatives.
A couple months ago, we, as the TMC youth board, hosted our very own youth board event called Ignite Creatives. It was an event for young artists to meet fellow young artists of many various specialties to talk and chillax in a chilled space. It offered an opportunity for young artists to exchange ideas of what they were doing, the various, different kinds of artists there are and the various spaces we enter.
The event took place in November, a time when many young people are figuring out and taking their next steps, like university fresher weeks and starting new jobs and apprenticeships and feeling lost amidst the chaos. That will be me next year! (What a scary thought) But lucky me, I have organisations like TMC and Creatives Now to go and seek advice, to talk to artists who have gone through and survived the chaos that it is to be a young artist. Not everyone, however, is aware of such organisations or they are too scared to approach them to seek advice, I know I was when I applied for the youth board.
So, as a youth board of young artists all at different stages and with different practices, we thought it would be immensely helpful to organise a chill event where young artists could join us for some pizza and workshops, like upcycling spray cans with Graffwerk and activity tables lead by other members of the youth board, and meet others in similar positions to themselves.
When we began the process of planning, I hadn’t realised just how much there is to consider. Each month I would leave the youth board meeting excited for the next stage. We voted on all the major details of the event, from food to artist to lead the workshop all the way to the actual space we would use. And after that we delegated the smaller tasks between ourselves, for example the health and safety checks, decorating the space to make it livelier and setting up other activities and ice breakers throughout the session.
Youth led events are important. Duh. But why? Shouldn’t we just leave it to the adults, the people who definitely know what they’re doing? No! Youth led events give us, as young people, an opportunity or a taste of what it’s like to organise and go through with such an event. We had some lovely adults who helped steer us in the right direction and keep us accountable, but we had the final say. I remember being presented with the budget for our event and told so what are you going to spend it on?
Now I could list a million and one reasons for why youth led events are important, but that might be a long and boring read, so instead I’ll leave you with one final and I think most important reason. Youth led events are, as the phrase suggests, youth led, which means we, young people, call the shots. That means we can incorporate our experiences into the organising of the event for things that could be overlooked, like the fact that tote bags are all the rage now, so we incorporated tote bags that young artists who participated were able to decorate and take away with them.
We were able to create an event that was actually useful for young people, because we know what young people would want from such an event, because we ourselves were the target of the event. A perfect strategy, no?