Southside: the next steps
Southside is a youth radio station, magazine, media and arts project, based at Church.co.uk – part of Oasis’ Hub in central London.
Southside facilitates informal learning and training programs to engage local young people in positive, constructive and creative activities that aid personal development. Through Southside we are encouraging young people to make a positive contribution to their community.
Southside Radio first broadcast in August 2005 with huge success and acclaim from local police and the community. Since then, the radio project has engaged around two hundred young people every summer.
The mission statement of the project, written by the young people themselves, talks about how Southside aims ‘to inspire hope, motivate ambition, challenge stereotypes and embrace diversity’.
In an area where gangs, guns, knives and youth unemployment have given young people a bad name, Southside provides vital training and opportunity for some of London's most vulnerable teenagers or as Southside’s young people put it, ‘We are about presenting young people like us in a positive light. Giving quiet people voices’.
This summer, Southside is back on FM radio and will provide young people with the opportunity to learn new skills. These include radio production and broadcast journalism during interactive hands-on workshops as part of a training course accredited by national awarding body, NCFE.
We will be transforming the basement of our Hub House youth centre into a TV studio and uploading one TV episode a week to Southside's website and YouTube. The TV episodes will be planned, shot and edited by a team of young people with support from an industry professional.
We're hoping to secure funding for a full-time development worker because we want to open up the recording studio at weekends (when the majority of youth crime occurs).
We'd also like to make use of the studio during the day and offer targeted sessions for teenage parents, young offenders and young people with special educational needs.
Over the next three years we hope to develop a social enterprise that will provide employment and training for local young people who struggle to find work due to lack of qualifications, lack of opportunity, communication barriers or other inhibiting social factors.
For more information on the project visit www.southsidemedia.org.uk