Working-class teens create new heritage for their communities
“We need to radically shift thinking around who owns heritage”, explains Emily Vickers
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Emily Vickers — Strategic Development Manager, RECLAIM
RECLAIM is a youth-led, values-based organisation which sees a way to engage young people and unlock their potential to build positive societies. We have eight years’ experience of delivering lasting change and working with young people aged 12–15 in supporting them to become powerful change makers: local role models and activists for social justice at a national level.
Our organisation works with young people to build their understanding of their area’s cultural heritage, enabling them to lead the way in making heritage accessible and relevant to their peers and the wider community. Through the HLF-funded project When We Were Kings, RECLAIM has supported young people to explore concepts and definitions of heritage more deeply, to lead community consultation in their local areas, and to build community pride and engagement through co-creating new websites and photography exhibitions showcasing working class communities’ heritage.
Participants told us that the project helped them understand more about the history of Manchester as a city, how it has changed over time and — critically — why that matters now, and that the most important part of the project was engaging communities in telling their own stories, in their own voices, bringing people together through shared memories, and enabling people who were too young, for instance, to experience the zoo, the races, events and amusements at Belle Vue, to learn about it first-hand and be proud of that hugely important part of Gorton’s heritage.
Our core LEAD Programme also has a strong focus on community development and engaging young people in understanding their past to help shape their future and build pride in their roots. Too often, we see that working class young people feel excluded from heritage sites. But they regularly engage with ‘heritage’ in other ways. Our participants are critical thinkers and help others to better understand heritage from the perspective of working class young people.
There’s still some way to go. A colleague recently took a group of young people from Salford to a national heritage site and had the depressing experience of the group being openly followed around by security. We need to radically shift thinking around who owns heritage, who it belongs to and who it is for.
RECLAIM is a Manchester-based youth leadership charity set up in 2007 with a bold aim to end leadership inequality within a generation. Its mission statement is ‘Working class young people being seen, being heard and leading change’. A movement for positive social action, RECLAIM encourages young people toward pro-active citizenship, critical and independent thinking, using their skills to improve their own lives and the lives of others around them, and challenging inherited truths.
