Introducing Our New Youth Leadership Programme

We're thrilled to be delivering a new Youth Leadership Programme in partnership with YMCA Heart of England and Positive Youth Foundation.

The YLC is made up of 9 young people who call Coventry home. They each have unique voices, different lived experiences and distinctive viewpoints. They discuss hopes and ambitions, worries and frustrations and support each other in weekly sessions where they digest the ins and outs of what it means to be a young person in Coventry today.

The programme has spent the first term exploring creativity and activism and thinking about what the young people of Coventry want, see and hope for their futures. So far they have:

• Created a manifesto that captures their ambitions
• Learned from creatives about career pipelines
• Worked with photographer, Ayesha Jones to capture portraits that represent their strengths.

With Coventry’s Poet Laureate, John Bernard, as their Creative Mentor, the group are learning how to amplify their voices to advocate for the future of their generation.

Working on a spoken word soundscape inspired by their manifesto, you’ll soon be able to hear the YLC voices fill our Mead Gallery.

By curating an exhibition for Warwick Arts Centre in Summer 2024, the YLC are exploring interior design, graphic design, spoken word, music and participatory arts.

Asking questions like ‘what is the creative future for the children and young people of Coventry?’, the exhibition will be formed around the YLC’s manifesto.

This group of young people call for change, call for action, call for coming together and call to be heard. They call for you to Activate / Assemble / Amplify alongside them!

 The Activate / Assemble / Amplify exhibition will interrogate the future of Coventry’s young people in an interactive exhibition that explores the YLC’s vision for themselves and their city.

Their ambition is to curate a discursive space where ideas spill across the gallery, encouraging dialogue, interaction and responses from visitors.

Activate / Assemble / Amplify will share artworks and performances made throughout the year as part of the Creative Learning Team’s Youth and Schools projects. It will extend the ideas prevalent in the works of Francis Offman and Nicole Bachman.

 Throughout the programme, the YLC will learn from young people who are already planning events and staging interventions through trips to London, Birmingham, and Nottingham.

They will hear from guest speakers with experience in activism, communications, marketing, curation, producing and programming and there will be collaborations with visual artists, social activists and changemakers from across the region, including the Coventry Youth Activists.

 The YLC programme’s ambition is to provide opportunities for the group to work, learn and grow together into the leaders that Coventry needs to ensure a bright future.

Together with the YMCA Heart of England and Positive Youth Foundation, Warwick Arts Centre are proud to be providing a platform for Coventry’s next generation of creative changemakers!