Our work in Southway has  been developing since the beginning of the year, focusing on 'Chill Out' - live music training and experience - and 'North Direction' - the creation of a community magazine. Run by professional musicians Si and Tim and FOTONOW respectively, both activities are engaging young people, tapping into their interests and building skills and confidence. As well as one-to-one tuition the young musicians have started to play together - with our activity leaders making sure that as many as possible can get involved, while the growing editorial team of the 'North Direction' magazine are photographing, writing and researching with the aim of launching their first issue in mid May.


This work is funded by the Plymouth Community Safety Partnership

We’re sorry to announce that the Big Arts Festival will have to take a rest this year due to financial restrictions, but we are making an application to Arts Council England for development funding to bring the event back - bigger and better - in 2013 and 2014.

You may remember that we announced a partnership with Plymouth University to deliver the 2012 festival linked to their 150^th anniversary.  Unfortunately, despite a great deal of interest, the sums didn’t add up and after exploring a number of other options we have decided that a ‘year off’ (in BAF’s 13^th year!) is the best option.

In lieu of BAF 2012, PCC’s Department for Children and Young People and Plymouth University will be coordinating the ‘Imagineering Festival’ at Plymouth Guildhall in July. Barefoot’s role will be to provide pre-event artist workshops for all the participating schools. Please see PCC’s ‘School Room’ for more information.

The Take a Shot project offers a programme of weekly non-contact boxing and film-making/photography sessions to groups of young people who have offended or are at risk of offending. Funded by the Government’s Community Action against Crime Innovation Fund (administered by the Home Office) ‘Take a Shot’ will be rolled out in the Whitleigh/Southway, Ernesettle and Plympton areas of Plymouth.

Barefoot has been working in close partnership with the Youth Offending Team and Plymouth City Youth Service to identify young people who could benefit from this project, who will be working with project partners FOTONOW and Plymouth Sports Academy. The structured boxing sessions will enable participants to gain ABA (Amateur Boxing Association) accreditation, whilst the film/making photography sessions will aim to produce short films and photographs about the lives of young people in local areas, to be screened at an end of project celebration event.

For more information please click here.

 

We’re just about to pilot a new CPD programme of seven after-school sessions aimed at teachers, TAs and other school workers who want inspiring ideas and access to new creative skills. ‘Art School’ will be all about building confidence and showing how you can help children achieve amazing results with simple materials and a bit of imagination. Experienced artist Jo Tyler will lead these first sessions which are taking place in close cooperation with the Southern Way Federation at Beechwood and Oakwood Primary schools.This is very much ‘non-scary’ art and will include topics such as making magic dream books with ‘no sew’ textile techniques (see photo), creating gorgeous quick and easy ceramics and finding out that you can draw!

We’ll be advertising Art School programmes in the New Year and will be contacting all schools and children’s centres in Plymouth and the local area with details of how they can get involved.