Welcome to the Advent Calendar, day 8. Sometimes young people know what they want and need, and they go out and achieve something extraordinary.
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This harkens all the way back to the first Good News Advent Calendar; I interviewed Adam Aslam about what his extraordinary Breaking Down Barriers group were doing. Of course, it’s not his group, as Adam would explain, it’s their group, and he just facilitates – but I was new to interviewing.
During the interview, he told me about this unique photography project every Sunday for a few months.
If you don’t remember back a year, you can read the post here – but let me tell you a bit about Breaking Down Barriers, in short, to set the scene.
BDB is a group set up through funds from the Health Lottery to be a youth-led project to, in their own words, “empower groups of young people across Harehills to try to tackle racial tensions, come up with creative activities that aim to promote cohesion and bring young people together.”
Youth-led means that there is a steering group of youth Ambassadors, all 13 to 19 years old, that meet regularly to decide on activities for the coming months. When I interviewed Adam, they had just started a photography course focused on capturing Harehills from their perspective.
For ten weeks, during winter and into early spring, the young people would meet up on a Sunday and head out to various parts of Harehills armed with cameras. They would capture what they saw, learning about photography and how to improve what they were capturing. Importantly, these photos were an expression of themselves, telling the stories they wanted to tell.
A lot of work went into how these photos would be displayed, and these fantastic photo trees were the result:
After a slight delay due to Covid, the EyE SEE HAREHILLS Art exhibition took place at the Thackeray Medical Museum this past March. It was a fantastic event.
The audience was packed, at least 60 people. Fantastic speakers, such as Councillor Asghar Khan, spoke about his background and inspirations. The most fascinating people to hear from were the young people themselves, with explanations of what this project meant and poetry to continue that theme of telling their story through art.
I did have some photos from the event, which I cannot find, and I only offer my apologies to the fantastic young people at Breaking Down Barriers. However, my only saving grace, many fantastic people covered the event on Social Media – so I’m going to share some of it with you.
Image borrowed from the ever-creative Karen Parnaby Harris, who also has a good photo collage or two from events
Harehills ❤️ Love 
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