A message from our Chief Executive, JR Josephs

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I met a fifteen-year-old in 2024 who'd been making beats on a cracked phone screen for two years. Nobody in his family worked in music. Nobody he knew had ever been inside a studio. He was good, extremely good, and he was about to give it up, because as far as he could tell there was no route from his bedroom to anything real.

 

He's now on our payroll as a youth lead in the studio.

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That's what your money does. Not "capacity building" or "engagement outcomes"; it puts a young person in a room with the right equipment and an adult who takes them seriously, and it keeps them there long enough for something to change.

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Since 2019 we've worked with over 800 young people across East London and given more than 30,000 hours of one-to-one support and mentoring. Everything we run is free. It has to be, the young people we exist for are the ones who can't pay, and the moment we charge, we're another door closed.

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But free doesn't mean cheap. It means someone else covers it.

• £50 gives one young person three hours in a studio.

• £150 funds a taster day for ten of them.

• £500 carries someone through a full six-week programme, from the first session to the showcase at the end.

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Most of the young people who come to us are dealing with more than a lack of opportunity. Some are in the care system. Some are known to youth offending teams. Nearly all of them have been told, in one way or another, that the creative industries aren't for people like them. The numbers back them up, the proportion of creative workers from working-class backgrounds has halved in a generation.

We're not going to fix that on our own. But we've got a building now, 20 years on the lease, and a plan to reach 1,000 young people a year.

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If you give today, you're not funding an organisation. You're paying for a young person to find out what they're capable of.

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Sirlute

 

 

JR Josephs

Chief Executive Officer