Nirushan Sudarsan told us more about the successes of the SEF Cymru Butetown Matters Project. The Butetown Matters project aims to build bridges between young people from different backgrounds and encourage them to find out what united them. Through the volunteering opportunities, the project aims for young people to develop team working skills, become role models and get direct experience of the third sector by engaging in activities that addressed social inequalities and injustices. Our young people have set up Butetown Matters. The barriers involved were financial and work/education commitments as it was a continuous platform for news to take place within the community expressing opinions, stories and issues from the perspective of the community and telling the story through the community’s narrative. It takes new skills and time to collate these stories and information to build a website for the local community and created a 12-page printed newsletter with key individuals from the community.
As a result of the funding and support, and an editorial group of young people formed and were responsible for writing and editing the content. They also made decisions on content and technical changes which helped develop the website and newsletter.
We were able to train and work with a group of 15 young people to run campaigns and were able to engage 20 individuals to capture stories, tell stories and get involved in the design and work of creating a website and printed newsletter. The project has allowed volunteers to develop team working skills, become role models and get direct experience of the third sector by engaging in activities that addressed social inequalities.
It has allowed the group to grow and engage more young people. We want to continue to improve by engaging local young people in the community and we thought using our networks would be more effective in engaging more volunteers.
The project has given volunteers space and flexibility to allow them to gain new skills to be able to communicate in different ways and tell the narrative how they wanted it told whilst improving skills in running and creating content for a local Newsletter.
The project has given young people the chance to tell their narratives in their own ways
