New challenge for the Leaveners
The Leaveners work with youth charity in Birmingham
The Quaker arts group the Leaveners has announced a new partnership with youth charity The Challenge.
In the first of what will hopefully be a series of activities, twenty-four Birmingham fifteen to seventeen year olds will meet on 6 September to create a giant map of their city. They will work with staff from both organisations to illustrate how they feel about the different areas of Birmingham.
The group is made up of teenagers from a wide variety of backgrounds, Adam Clarke, director of the Leaveners, told the Friend. He added that when, at a preliminary meeting, he asked teenagers how they might depict certain parts of the city, one suggested using illustrations of a gun and a knife, while another answered ‘red brick houses and the Cadbury logo’.
The project ties in well with the Leaveners’ new mission statement, Adam said. It also echoes the organisation’s move towards working with a broader cross section of the arts than in the past.
Adam joined the Leaveners in the spring and hopes to see the charity engaging much more regularly with younger people, including those beyond the Quaker community.
He attended the recent Yearly Meeting Gathering in Bath. While this was, he admitted, a steep learning curve, it also represented ‘a great opportunity to meet supporters and donors’.
‘We had some fantastically positive feedback. It was good to find out that what I’m doing at the Leaveners is being received well,’ he said. Adam went on to pay tribute to his predecessors at the Leaveners, and the YMG programme they started putting together before his appointment.
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