How the tragic death of a 15 year old boy in my neighbourhood led me to launch a music production workshop for young people facing barriers
One year ago on November 7, a 15 year old boy named Alfie was stabbed to death in broad daylight by another boy of similar age 5 minutes from my home in a suburb of Leeds. The stabbing took place just outside the primary school that both of my children, now in secondary school, had attended. My daughter was only a few minutes away when the attack happened and many young people did witness it. The community, most especially Alfie’s family and friends, was left devastated. There was widespread shock along the lines of ‘this sort of thing doesn’t happen here.’
In fact there has been a steady increase of anti-social behaviour and violent crime among the youth in my area over many years that’s attracted County Lines and landed many young people in the Youth Justice system. My partner recently left Youth Justice having worked there for more than 20 years and knew Alfie as he’d been one of her cases for a short time.
Due to a combination of austerity policies, removal of local youth offerings, lack of mental health support in the education system and increased poverty in the area et al, the needs of many children—particularly of secondary school age—are not being met. Many young people fall between the cracks.
Those between the ages of roughly 12 to 19 have almost no public spaces to gather indoors, very little to do and are largely unwelcome in the world of adults. Where I grew up we had local record stores, comic stores, gaming centres and other spaces where we were welcome at those ages. Today such spaces are only found in the city centre and still skew largely towards adult demographics. Many children in the area have also been let down repeatedly by the important adults in their lives with minimal support from the system to compensate. To make matters worse, they have few opportunities for creative self-expression, emotional support or emotional education.
Alfie’s killing affected the entire community, myself included. Alfie could have been either of my children and it was the last straw for me. I decided I had to do something so I applied for the West Yorkshire Mayor’s Safer Communities Fund to run a music production workshop for kids of secondary school age facing barriers.
In September I got the funding.
The wonderful Leeds Youth Service have provided me with a venue and a support worker to help facilitate the workshop. I got all the state of the art equipment set up and ran my first session last week. We’ll be working on projects chosen by the kids and learn the skills to achieve those projects along the way. There’s no curriculum or course work, it is free-form and flexible. It is also a safe space and we’ll be having check-ins at the start of each session where the kids can say anything they feel like saying without judgement. The only rules are mutual respect and looking after the equipment.
We all feel the despondency of these dark times. With the ongoing genocide in Gaza, US, UK and mainstream media complicity in it, the US election aftermath, the looming spectre of climate change and other humanitarian crises across the globe it is easy to repeatedly fall into the pit of despair. But remember this: the world we want to live in can only be built from the bottom up, not the top down. Rather than investing all this energy shouting into the abyss of social media, I urge you to consider channeling that energy into improving something, however small, in your community instead.
Admittedly this whole project is all way out of my post-pandemic, neurodivergent comfort zone and I was rather anxious about delivering the first session. I am struggling to pay the bills amidst this cost of living crisis as a musician, despite my white male middle class privilege. I realise not everyone is in a position to do something on this scale and I need to acknowledge that some are already doing far more but I hope that my little story will provide some hope that we can all be empowered to bring about positive change in society, even through the smallest acts of compassion and kindness. If we are to get through these troubled times and arrive at something better we must be true to love and refuse to give in to fear.
I’ll be posting progress reports on the workshop as we go along. If you’ve read this far, you are amazing.
