Digital Voice: Nurturing North East Ambition
“I don’t believe where you’re from should determine what you go on to achieve.”
- Bridget Philipson, BBC Look North, August 2024
It’s exam result season and with it the inevitable news that the North/South gap in attainment is widening as well as the gap between pupils educated at state and private schools. Newly appointed Secretary of State for Education, Bridget Philipson, who grew up in the North East and was state-educated (at this writer’s old school in fact), wants to change this and so does Digital Voice.
Our ambitious DreamIt project kick-started our strategic objective to work with a group over a longer term, with the aim of creating deeper engagement and cementing new skills. Thanks to Postcode Lottery funding, we were able to do so by creating a project that placed the young people, and their ambitions for the future, at its heart.
The project involved creating a short film which included creative writing, AI generated animation and sound design and asked the group what they thought their future might look like. For a group of young people aged 11-14 this soon became more than having fun with AI (although it really was fun), it was about them seeing what was possible; being given the space to dream. Dreams of being a wrestler; a pharmacist; a nail technician; a lawyer; or the brilliant combination of an actor who also owns a bookshop, sat alongside an acute awareness of what might go wrong in the future if societal ills like climate change and gender inequality weren’t addressed.
Don’t worry they have a plan for that too!
It’s little wonder that at the launch event in Chopwell’s Community Centre, feedback from the audience who watched their film included comments like ‘super aspirational’, ‘this is such important work’ and ‘definitely needs to be funded again’; it is and it should be.
“It’s very important to us as an organisation, that young people in our region have the opportunities to make meaningful work and learn new skills. Our aim to work longer-term, along with the support and scaffolding of our team of professional artists, ensures that their ideas can be fully realised in a high quality product that they authored and can be so proud of. It’s important to remember that we never set out to teach them how to be creative, they already are, Digital Voice’s role is to create the conditions for their creativity to flourish.”
- Julie Nicholson, Managing Director, Digital Voice
You’ll see from their film how hard the young people worked and the number of new skills they picked up along the way. This is just the beginning for them; we as a community, across sectors, across the North East, need to keep nurturing and feeding their ambitions.
It’s vital for all our futures.
You can see the DreamIt film and a short making-of documentary here.