Could you tell our readers a little about the project?
The project is driven by the Limestone United Cross Community Project and it is a project working with young people living on the interface between Limestone Road and the surrounding areas in North Belfast, like Tiger’s Bay and Newington.
Was there tension on the interface area?
We noticed a little while ago that there was a substantial spike in activity and while we worked with the young boys, we found that there were young girls involved as well and that was something we hadn’t expected. At that time our young people were very vulnerable to becoming involved in negative behaviour, and there were some outside influences as well. It really doesn’t take much to set things off in a particular direction. If you let things slide, the entire community can be affected and then young people start being blamed for all sorts of things and it can be extremely difficult to get them off the streets and involved in some useful programmes. After evaluating the situation, we decided to set up a girls’ group.
How did the creative writing project emerge?
As I said, we were working with young people on the interface, particularly through the young girls’ group, and we were trying to address tensions on the street, trying to overcome some hurdles that the area was facing. We had formed the group, but we found that it was very challenging working with a cross community group, and it could be very difficult to get the young people together and work out common themes that we could address. But, as the group got to know each other, the one thing we found was that there was a lot of creativity within the group. We also worked with a group of young lads, in some cases they had been working with us for a lot longer, and again we started looking at creativity within that group.
Our idea was to use creative writing to give the young people a voice, a chance to express their thoughts and opinions about the challenges they were, and are, facing. We also wanted to hear from them about their hopes for peace in Northern Ireland.
Was this new approach a surprising route to take?
It was a bit of a transition for us. A lot of the work we were doing was around building good relations, tackling sectarianism, and ensuring community safety, but we just started to think that we needed to maybe look at ways the young people could get an opportunity to try different methods of expressing themselves. So, perhaps not a complete surprise, but it was more that we started to look at different ways of working with young people.
For more information on Limestone United see – www.facebook.com/limestoneunited
