1525 Do-It-Yourself
1525 Do-It-Yourself was a series of workshops, skill-shares and talks developed in response to our collective of young people, 1525 Collective, who expressed interest in learning about how to create and run their own events and workshops. These sessions aimed to equip young people with skills to 'do it themselves', create a space for soundboarding ideas and leave empowered to create the projects that they wanted to see happening in their local communties and social circles.
Our workshops were lead by Sonia Tyrna, a queer and Polish ceramic artist. Sonia is co-founder of social enterprise, Collaborative Future where they provide space and support for young people to find value and be valued in their work. Sonia is a part of Zesty's Collective, a Nottingham-based queer collective. Through her ceramic practice, she has hosted skill-swaps with other makers adn has ran workshops for young people sharing her love for clay.
At Collaborative Future (CF), she fequently plans and facilitates various one-off workshops, entire programmes of events and spaces for peer learning in particularly for unemployed and underemployed young people, as well as for the local Nottingham freelance community. In addition to this, she co-facilitates training for organisations on collaboration and communication in the workplace with her team at CF.
With Zesty's Collective, she regularly plans and hosts various creative workshops and crafternoons for the Nottingham LGBTQIA+ and questioning community.
Through these sessions with Sonia, we learned the intricacies of designing and hosting spaces with a consideration of the unique needs and wants of a community or audience. We clarified next steps in making an event a reality, delving into the process of event planning, which we plotted across two collaborative maps of ideas, experiences, and learnings.