Young Urban Arts Foundation, a charity empowering young people through creative arts
Kerry has been in the Drum N Bass scene since 1995 and has undoubtedly carved her space in the music industry. She has had an interesting career path, with achievements such as working with the likes of Fabio & Grooverider, Mickey Finn, S.P.Y, Tommy Dee and has spent time with pioneers Afrika Bambaataa and Kool DJ Herc. With all of this in her pocket, Kerry decided that there was something that she could give back to the community she grew up in and cares about.
In 2009, Young Urban Arts Foundation was established with the mission of engaging disadvantaged and vulnerable young people with music and other arts. YUAF have created a variety of different workshops to make the program accessible to many situations schools or communities could be having. One method is bringing their staff and resources to schools, community centres, youth hubs, or any venue for that matter, but they also have their Outreach Media Bus for harder to reach areas.
Their programmes empower young people to express and explore their creativity in DJ workshops, creating tracks, graffiti art, performance, street dance, positive rap/ spoken word, singing, tee art, nail art, positive clothing project, animation and remixing tracks. With their collaboration and participation of local partners, organisations and charities they have supported 17,500 engaging in their programme and around 13,400 students have been reached by the Outreach Media Bus.
It has been a common misconception that these activities encourage hooliganism and vandalism to private property, or that rap encourages ‘gangsterism’ to a young generation, however, if you listen to the youth they argue differently. If you give young people a vice for creativity, distraction of the difficulties of just being a teenager and a way to express that angst, they are in a far better position to deal with the fall out of poverty.
These young people aren’t usually just dealing with normal teenage angst, many societal issues breed in a pool of empty pockets from addiction, homelessness, mental health issues like depression and anxiety to general bad health. YUAF tap right in the heart of these communities and start an actual dialogue which can teach young people to express the lives that they are living in a creative way rather than finding things to do in the streets.
Child poverty is set to hit a record high in 2019. Government figures have shown that over 4 million children were living in poverty in 2018, which is 1 in 3 children in the UK. These figures may not be surprising to people who have lived through this austerity and have seen the direct effects this poverty have caused. The rise in crime, and specifically knife crime in London, the rise in mental health issues and suicide, and the massive increase of homelessness throughout the whole country.
To add a bit of context, I left school in the summer of 2013 with a big fuck you in my pocket. I went to school in the South of England just outside of Brighton, where there is more money going per capita compared to the North, however, it is not distributed accordingly. Michael Gove was the Education Secretary at the time and decided to implement Academies to ‘under-achieving’ schools which resulted in fancy classrooms with new computers, but a lack of pastoral care for all students.
Music GCSE was supposed to be my safe haven, and I was hyped to be enrolled as I was brought up around DJing and music from my father, but this hope was smashed within 1 lesson. My teacher made it very apparent that non-classical students are instantly ungradable and have no career in the industry. During this time politically, Gove was slaughtering the education system whilst attempting to enact major change to the pre-existing programme. As a year, we were pushed into starting our GCSE’s in Year 9 at around 14, which if additional support was implemented it may have worked, however, all we felt was more pressure. In year 11, we should have been finishing off our GCSE’s and looking forward to starting college but we were completing our 10 GCSEs with an A-Level which coincided with a charity based project we had to complete too. For a girl who was battling with an eating disorder and the corrosion of her family home, this was too much, I left home and school with no turning back.
6 years later, I had the pleasure of interviewing Riya and Lady MC before their set at Cheeky Monday in Amsterdam and we got talking about her organisation, Young Urban Arts Foundation. This sent me back to the days of being in clean classrooms surrounded by kids whose dreams were already shattered and how much this scheme would have helped many disadvantaged children all over the country.
I was also a bored teenager who was looking for entertainment from a town with boarded-up youth centres, but maybe all we needed was a MIDI.
