Hello, I'm Sarah. I'm 16 years old and I'll be writing a blog about working with Great North Run Culture through the Changemakers programme.
I have been working on my Changemakers project for a couple of months now and things are really beginning to take off.
The project consists of two main elements:
1) Helping the team to develop communications strategies that will reach and engage a younger audience and also
2) Working with GNRC’s poet in residence from last year, Kate Fox,
to create workshops for 11 – 14 year olds. These will provide the
research and backbone for Kate’s new show ‘The starting line’ which will
be performed during the Great North Run Culture 2012 programme, and
produced by the ARC in Stockton.
Last week I managed to get some work done on both elements of the
project on the same day! On Tuesday I came to the GNRC office to present
some research I had collected on successful and not-so successful
examples of communications to target and captivate younger people, from
which I made some more general and useful conclusions about what works
for young people and what really doesn’t on Facebook and Twitter. We
figured that getting the balance between cultural jargon-loaded and
random ‘trying too hard’ posts/ tweets is crucial!
After this I went to Northern Stage for a meeting with Kate Fox herself. Over coffee, we discussed the
nature of the research element of her forthcoming workshops and her
ideas about the link between creativity (writing) and activity
(running). We pondered the questions of what stops young people
exercising at that age? What would make us actively and independently
choose to write or run? And what would convince young people to get
stuck in and do rather than just watch? It is these questions that we
decided to base the workshops around discovering the answers to; we
await and anticipate some interesting responses from the groups.
And so, there’s a lot to be getting on with in working out the best
way to discover these answers and get the best out of the groups in the
workshops!
