The Baytree Centre
Throughout 2023 we have been excited to develop new partnerships with organisations supporting children and young people, using our trauma-informed approach and building upon a series of successful pilot programmes. In 2022 we collaborated with the Baytree Centre in South London for a one-off creative pilot workshop with a group of girls that attend the centre. The workshop participants were a fantastic group to work with, who all engaged with the activities and showed us how creative they were. This year we have been delighted to go back to the Baytree Centre to deliver a series of creative workshops over several weeks, culminating in a celebration at the end. This has been made possible by our collaboration with Kaisia, a faculty member at Queen Mary’s University.
The Baytree Centre is situated in Brixton, South London and serves as a community hub for women and girls from multicultural and multilingual backgrounds. They provide many essential services such as English classes, mentoring and advice and support for new migrants and refugees, and are passionate about enabling their community of women and girls to be empowered, and thrive in all aspects of their lives. Their values are very aligned with Kazzum’s, adopting a person-centred and asset-based approach, focussing on increasing agency, confidence, self-esteem and wellbeing.
“I liked decorating the books because it made me feel calm.”
Our work with the Baytree Centre was built on core project aims: increasing confidence in participants, creating space for emotional expression, engendering pride in one’s multicultural heritage, and reducing isolation. When developing the content of the workshops, we wanted to ensure that the young people were able to guide the decision-making towards activities that they would enjoy and benefit from. This meant that we developed a consultancy workshop to start with, to give the young people a chance to experience the types of activities that might feature in the workshop series and suggest others that they would also like to do. The feedback from this session then guided the types of workshops that came after, and our facilitators reflected after each workshop on the responses of the participants and how the following week could be improved or adjusted accordingly. This method of working is an example of our ‘Amplify Youth Voice Strategy’ in action.
Our multidisciplinary artists Maz Koshika and Shirin Taherzadeh collaborated to devise a series of participatory workshops ranging from personalising notebooks to flower arranging, cyanotype printing, photography and drawing! Many of the young people reflected that they enjoyed different activities and felt creative whilst doing them. The final session was a summer party put on by the centre, giving the young people a chance to showcase their work and celebrate the effort they put into each session over the year.
“I feel happy and sad. I was happy that I got to draw lots of things and sad that I’m leaving.”
Whilst our current programme of activity at the Baytree Centre has come to an end, we are so grateful for the connection that we now have with an organisation doing such incredible work in their community. We look forward to a building further creative opportunities to connect in the future.
Thanks to the young people at the Baytree Centre, Maz Koshika, Shirin Taherzadeh, Andrea Elkin, Kaisia Mika-Bresolin, The Baytree Centre staff and the Centre for Public Engagement at Queen Mary University London.