How a simple ‘what if?’ question is helping Hackney kids do better in school

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWWE0Yyddrg

[A story I wrote for The London Community Foundation…]

Lots of great ideas start with a simple “what if…?” question. For Catriona Maclay, the moment came when she was talking with friends over dinner.

As a secondary school teacher in North London, she’d noticed how easily young people could fall behind in their studies. Catriona asked herself: what if you put those children in a learning space like nothing they’d ever experienced, gave them a fun, real-world project to work on, gave them lots of support from community volunteers – could you turn their lives around?

To try and answer that question, Catriona created Hackney Pirates, a charity that develops the literacy, confidence and perseverance of young people in Hackney.

After four years of hard work, fundraising, and life-changing success, the project now has a home of its own – a magical shop, café and learning space in Dalston, aptly called the Ship of Adventures.

Local young people aged 9–12 — known as pirates —   are referred to the project by their school or social services.  A typical visit will see each young pirate paired with a volunteer who will spend 45 minutes helping them with homework or reading books from the ship’s library. They then work together on the pirate’s creative project, which changes each term.

One project involved the pirates in making a CD of motivational speeches. They read a range of speeches, got a feel for how they were written and how they were best performed, and then wrote, performed and recorded speeches of their own.

Making a CD or creating a book is “really important because the children work towards real-world consequences,” says Catriona. “We noticed that a tangible objective is really motivating and exciting for young people.”

It’s a year since Hackney Pirates moved into the Ship of Adventures, a step that has been “completely game changing”, says Catriona. “When we were moving all the time, we were never able to completely focus on growing our social impact. Now we have stability, we are able to focus in a positive way, working with more children and allowing us to double the size of our learning programme.

“We now have shop where we can sell the young people’s work, underlining those ‘real-world consequences’. They now get to see their work, published on shelves every time they walk in here. It’s also our face to the world and a step towards putting our mission of learning adventures on the high street and promoting that anyone can come be a part of it.”

Hackney Pirates have benefitted from two rounds of funding provided by Dalston Bridge, a fund managed by The London Community Foundation. This helped to finance workshops for the pirates in their school holidays and paid for iPads they use for their creative projects and homework. It also funded some of the inspiring staff who’ve enabled the project to grow, to work with more children, and to make the most of its new home.

Impact studies show that 96% of the pirates’ teachers say children involved in the project show improved confidence, with 78% seeing better engagement with writing and attitude to learning. As for the pirates, 94% of them say coming to the project helps them at school.

The vision is for Hackney Pirates to become a community hub for learning, recognised as a place on the high street that has resources and volunteers to support young people, teachers and families — a kind of halfway house between schools and communities.

“Schools in Hackney are fantastic and we’ve seen incredible improvement over the years. We are not trying to replace school, but supplement it,” says Catriona. “We do the bit that schools are less able to do, and that’s give personalised attention to those who need it most, whether that’s because they’re statemented or there is some kind of intervention going on at school. We help with the building of confidence, perseverance and positive attitude to learning.”

Writing with wu-shih

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I ran a workshop at the Wise Words festival in Canterbury a couple of weeks ago. This is an excellent community arts event with an ambition to “inspire wonder and engage curiosity.”

People were certainly curious about my writing with constraints session. I’d hoped that maybe eight people might turn up. Two minutes before start time I had just one. But then a stream of people flooded in. There were so many that I joked about how we might want to barricade the doors. And then when even more came I thought I might have to start turning them away.

In the end, I counted 23 writers, which was great. Many of them had never been to a writing workshop before, which was lovely.

I read a book about Zen philosophy over the summer – Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen – and some of the ideas I encountered there bubbled up when we started to write some Haiku. Watts has a wonderful chapter about Zen arts, where he discusses archery, kendo and bonseki, as well as poetry. Haiku, he says, quoting the great Japanese master Basho, should be written in the spirit of “wu-shih” – the thought that the poem is “nothing special”.

If you call yourself a poet – never mind a writer – you take on a weighty burden of cultural baggage. I’m inspired by Basho’s belief that poetry – and Haiku in particular – can be written by ordinary people, for ordinary people. Yes, some people are gifted writers, but that shouldn’t discourage other people from having a go and using a form like Haiku to examine their experience of the world. As Watts says:

“The point of these [Zen] arts is the doing of them rather than the accomplishments. But more than this, the real joy of them lies in what turns up unintentionally in the course of practice, just as the joy of travel is not nearly so much in getting where one wants to go as in the unsought surprises which occur on the journey.”

Yep, that kind of sums up the approach I’m trying to encourage with these workshops. Watts also says: “A good Haiku … invites the listener to participate instead of leaving him dumb with admiration while the poet shows off.” People in the workshop participated, wrote words and shared them with each other, if they felt like it. That makes me very happy.

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Homeless in Kingston

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This is Matt Hatton. He’s the director of a small charity called Kingston Churches Action on Homelessness. As the name suggests, Matt’s group helps homeless people in the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames. Some of them are sleeping rough on the streets, most have no place to call home – they maybe sleep on a mate’s sofa – others are at risk of becoming homeless, often because they can’t pay the rent or have been kicked out.

Matt’s group runs a drop-in centre that gives people advice about housing and benefits. Most of the people who visit expect KCAH to find them somewhere to live, but that’s not usually possible. Hostel and council beds are in short supply in Kingston, as they are elsewhere across London. And many of Matt’s ‘clients’ have serious drug and alcohol problems; they often need to address those before they can be housed.

I’m writing an article about Matt and his work for The London Community Foundation, a charity that funds small, grassroots groups across the capital. I recently became their writer in residence, something I’ll share more about later. Part of my role involves writing stories about the people the LCF works with, the projects it supports, and the Londoners in need who benefit from all this good work. Visiting Matt was one of my first assignments.

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This is Georgie Foreshaw. She’s a housing advisor who works with Matt. If you face a housing crisis, Georgie is the person you’ll most likely end up talking to. She’ll try to help you get back on your feet. And if you’re desperate, she might give you a tin of soup, a sleeping bag, and maybe even some clothes.

Georgie laughed when I asked her to describe a typical day; they’re always different. When I asked her to tell me a story about one client, this is what she shared:

“Her dad was a heroin addict. He left home when she was two. At thirteen, she went into care. She was bounced around from place to place and started using drugs. When she first came to the drop-in service, she was on the streets, selling herself. She was high and paranoid. But for some reason she trusted me. She’d come to the centre every day and then I’d not see her for ages. It was very random. Then she settled into a pattern, visiting twice a week. We built a nice routine. Now she’s in temporary accommodation with the council. She’s been clean for ten weeks and is doing brilliantly. She’s even talking about going to college. When she stops coming to see me, it will be sad – but lovely.”

I spent a morning with Matt and Georgie. I think they are amazing people. I’ve written my stories about the work they do and will post some links here when they have been published.

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The way to go for help

 

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The KCAH offices. There are often people living in this car park. None on the day I visited, thankfully.

Constraints liberate

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Bit slow to share my news on this one, but I ran a workshop on writing with constraints as part of the Guildford Literary Festival this summer. All of the 20 tickets for the event sold, which was very pleasing.

It was wonderful to see a room full of writers beavering away with their pens and notebooks, and to hear them sharing their words and thoughts. And their feedback was just lovely:

– Neil Baker is inspiring!
– Wonderful, inspiring facilitator. Would be interested in more workshops please.
– Just to thank Neil for making it so much fun and making us all feel so relaxed and comfortable.
– It was excellent. Well conceived, researched and delivered.
– Very well organised, great value.
– It allowed me to get free from my fear of writing.
– Engaging presentation, well presented.
– The timed writing exercises were a really good way to impose frameworks but allow creativity.
– It would be helpful to have more similar workshops.
– I will now never say again I don’t have time to write – 6 minutes is all you need!
– Thank you for a very thought provoking workshop this morning. May submit myself to the discipline of haiku now
– Went to fab ‘constraints’ workshop run by Neil Baker. Awestruck by how much he crammed in & what emerged.
– Thank you to Neil Baker for a fantastic “Writing with constraints” workshop this morning

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And here’s a tiny video clip of the writers in action.

 

THE STORY INSIDE

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This is Zoe Tynan Campbell, designer at Stumped Studio. I’m writing a piece of short fiction for Fiera magazine inspired by work she is showing at the London Design Festival.

Last week I popped round to her home/workshop to find out more about what she does, and why. It was also a bit of a trip down memory lane for me, as I used to live just round the corner from Zoe’s.

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This cute little piece of wood is what Zoe calls a Hasbeen (Sorry about the awful photo. You really have to hold a Hasbeen in your hand to appreciate its loveliness). She gathers unwanted or discarded lumps of wood and uses her wonderful lathe and impressive range of chisels to reveal the beautiful Hasbeen inside each one.

I like the idea that within every chunk of dull, utilitarian office furniture or rejected off-cut there is a delightful, playful character waiting patiently for its – or his, or her – chance to come out and be enjoyed.

Hasbeens have no particular function or purpose. But they are comforting to hold, to look at or just to have around. And watching Zoe make one reminded me to search for the story that is always waiting below the surface.

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http://vimeo.com/106274671

What is art for?

If you’re trying to make Art – and the capital A is deliberate – is it helpful to have some kind of end purpose in mind, some kind of idea about how your Art might be useful to the world, or even just to one person?

Back in my student days I wrote a 10,000-word dissertation about the value of art for art’s sake. It was handwritten in scrawling blue biro on WH Smith lined paper; no record exists. Perhaps that’s a good thing? I remember finishing the conclusion on the Tube, just before my train pulled in to Highbury and Islington station.

The five uses of art outlined in this video are worth thinking about…

 

 

Economist article: Hanli Prinsloo

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My article for The Economist about ocean campaigner Hanli Prinsloo (above) has just been published. Here’s how it starts…

Hanli Prinsloo was jogging on a Cape Town beach when she found two girls kicking a dead dolphin that had washed ashore. It could have been a creature from a distant galaxy, for all they knew.

Ms Prinsloo, a competitive free-diver and ocean lover, told the girls how Dolphins are mammals that live in family groups. That the females—like the one they had just stopped kicking—suckle their offspring for even longer than humans.

“Now they were sitting down, wiping sand off the dolphin, and pledging to stay with ‘her’ until the body had been taken away,” says Ms Prinsloo. “It was an amazing transformation. Imagine what might happen if you could take those girls into the water and show them what’s down there?”

You can read the rest here

The Sevillanos in his yellow hat

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I spend so much of my time writing. Yet I don’t think I have any photos of myself actually doing it. So the one above is rare indeed. I was on a writing retreat in Spain, in the hills above Aracena. I took this photo as I wanted to work out the self-timer on my new camera. My first effort failed, hence the photo of the empty chair below.

 

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They make an interesting couple. I wonder what I was writing at the time. I looked very focused in that first photo. But perhaps I was just pretending. And look at the second one: an empty chair; an empty pair of shoes. They speak of absence.

The day before, in a cafe in Seville, I took the photo below. An old man dressed head to toe in white linen, wearing a bright yellow hat. He kept a pair of silver pince-nez in a silver box. He read the day’s newspaper intently.

I went to the same cafe the next morning, before meeting friends for lunch and taking a taxi into the hills. He was there again, in the same clothes, reading the newspaper.

I wonder now, was he reading the same newspaper as when I first saw him? It would make an interesting story. The man who reads the same piece of news, every morning of his life. Why would he do that?

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A poem full of holes

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Here’s a quick update about an interesting project I worked on recently.

Writer John Simmons asked me and a few other people to create a collaborative poem on the theme of ‘home’. The idea emerged from a conversation between John and designer Mike Abrahams about a residential property development Mike was working on with Jaccaud Zein Architects.

A big building site would normally be shut away behind a wall of chipboard hoardings. Such a barrier keeps the public safe, but does nothing to engage their curiosity. I know I can’t walk past a development without wondering what’s going on inside. Mike wanted to rethink the traditional screen in a way that would play on this natural fascination.

He came up with the idea of drilling a grid of holes in the hoardings – so people could look through – and then filling some of them with yellow plugs in a way that formed letters and spelled out words. The little plugs are easy to move, which meant he could change the words if he wanted to. Mike and John then decided to create a 12 line poem and to display each line on the hoardings for a month. They then thought of asking 12 writers to produce a line each. At which point I became involved.

There were some interesting constraints. Each line had to be 34 characters so that it fit the space exactly. To give the writing some unifying structure, each line had to start with the word that ended the preceding line, and the whole piece had to start and end with the word ‘home’.

It was great fun to work on. The project attracted some very positive media coverage. Some members of the previously excluded public found the experience so engaging that they moved the yellow plugs to make words of their own – I approve of such anarchic reinvention!

Here’s the poem in full. I wrote the third line.

Home opens up your own vision of possible
Possible dances new beginnings with joy
Joy in your heart tread lightly with love
Love and soft arms that hold us each night
Night rooms of sorrows and ardour speak
Speak dream bright windows to your world
World made divine by the promises we keep
Keep dreams alive and nightmares at bay
Bay of belonging a shared harbour our own
Own part of my restless heart sweet place
Place me in the bosom of this loving house
House me in the heartbeat at heart of home

Apart from myself and John, the writers involved in the project are Faye Sharpe, Sarah Farley, Richard Pelletier, Charlotte Halliday, Tim Rich, Jan Dekker, Sue Evans, John Dodds, Jamie Jauncey and Stuart Delves.