Coin Street Young Leaders meet weekly to discuss issues relevant to young people, plan events and activities and get to know each other. In the last year, the young leaders have planned and put on a Youth Showcase for local young people to perform including singing, dancing and acting, presented to the Southbank Forum (a meeting for local people hosted by our MPs) in September and again in March and hosted meetings with local young people and youth organisations with councillors and politicians as guests.
Some of the young people have want to share their own pieces of art work or just what they have been doing in lockdown with Waterloo Festival.
Iman is very creative and writes, draws, paints and creates Origami. Here is her painting of Waterloo.
Liam wanted to share some thoughts about an extended project he is doing for school. It explores how businesses should be embracing green technology:
Quarantine’s been pretty boring for everyone and we’ve all had to change our daily activities and find something new or interesting to do at home. Before quarantine had started, I had actually started a small research project in school alongside my A-levels called an EPQ (Extended project qualification). This project included a lot of independent research, a 5000 word essay on the research and a final presentation about my journey in the project. Right now I’m about half way into the essay and I hope to finish it during the summer, it’s taking so long to complete mainly due to the lack of resources available during our current circumstances.
My essay is on manufacturing and it analyses whether using green manufacturing will improve the industry financially and reduce the impact we have on our planet at the same time. My initial research proved that green manufacturing was good for the environment and that the old lean manufacturing system wasn’t good enough to tackle the current crisis of global warming. My issue however was that the only examples of successful manufacturers that had gone completely green were big companies for example IKEA. This made me question why only big companies were switching to green processes, after some more research I found out that small businesses weren’t moving to green because of financial reasons and other technical difficulties with switching to green.
As I dug deeper I realized that there were many issues surrounding small companies’ attempting different sustainable manufacturing techniques and so I decided to do my essay on this. The essay question is 'Would moving from lean manufacturing to green manufacturing be beneficial to manufacturing companies?' and I plan on assessing whether the switch to green is actually difficult for small companies and whether the financial losses of moving to green are worth it for the better of our planet.
I’m interested in this topic because I did Design Technology at GCSE and I would like to study engineering at university. Doing this project has kept me busy during quarantine which is good as without the project I would probably be watching tv and gaming all day but instead I can spend an hour or two everyday researching and writing the essay.
Maya has written a creative writing piece for another online festival A Town Explores A Book:
"I stood at the feet of the large cascading concrete steps in awe. Towering over me was a roof like structure with famous figures from before Christ carved into the marble supported by pillars so tall that it blocked the sun's warm rays, casting a shadow over me and an unsettling chill. I marched up the steep slabs and reached a strong oak and iron door. Without a doubt in my mind, I pushed the door open and stepped over the threshold of present and past.
I was greeted by a lingering smell of dust as I stumbled across the ancient artefacts from across the seven seas. Next, came the strong scent of bleach used on the pristine floors scrubbed until your reflection could be seen through your reflection. I tilted my head and eyes upwards to what I would expect of a ceiling but in fact I saw fractures of glass framed by onyx iron in a never-ending triangular canopy.
My body pivoted eastwards as I prepared myself to greet the one thing that placed me here in the first place."
Nishi is one of the youth workers that facilitates the young leaders sessions she has been running lots of creative sessions online for young people - here is a photo of an origami giraffe she made in one of the sessions:
Logan created this brilliant video to encourage other young people to stay positive in lockdown. It was part of a project we are running with London Youth called Future Talent to support young people to achieve in their future careers:
Laura is one of the youth workers that facilitates the young leaders sessions and also the gardening group at Coin Street. She wanted to share a picture of a beautiful poppy as spending time in the garden has been really positive for her wellbeing during lockdown:
Adam would like to share this photo of a fox that he had a staring contest with recently.
Jesse has been creating his own fashion designs while he has been spending time at home and has started to make his own facemasks:
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