By Alfie Wilson, YCC member
Being part of the First Story Young Creatives Collective (YCC) is one of the best parts of all our First Story journeys. Not only does this new alumni initiative give us masses of freedom planning our own project, but is also a great way of giving something back and enriching the experience of current First Story students with the help of our amazing mentors from the First Story team.
To begin planning, all 10 members of the collective along with our First Story mentors, met for the first time in July at the beautiful Cliffe House – a residential retreat in Yorkshire.
The whole weekend was incredible and really productive, but what did we actually achieve? Well, apart from our intense matches of Connect Four, we also decided to create First Story’s first-ever zine: Inkling.
All alumni (aged up to 25) and current First Story students can submit either a piece of short prose, poetry or visual art. As exciting as this is, however, we want to make sure we have a real life impact so, before we even started planning, we landed on these three aims to act as project guidelines:
- engage young people with creativity,
- use this to empower them,
- diversify the young people that have access to creativity
This is why we chose to create a zine as we all felt this would be the best way to achieve our goals.
Alongside gaining loads of new skills and invaluable insights into creative industries, one thing that we all realised during the residential was that creativity doesn’t just have to be for “traditionally” creative people: everything, even budgeting (surprisingly), can become an opportunity for creativity. Everyone has a personal story to tell, and the Young Creatives Collective is all about giving people the foundations to do this in innovative and relevant ways.
But there is still a long way to go, and to make our zine a success, we need submissions. More info on how to submit is coming soon and, on behalf of the YCC, good luck!
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