For they are jolly good fellows, for they are jolly good fellows…Happy Birthday Digital Voice!
Digital Voice celebrated its 15th Birthday this year and we’re taking some time to reflect on what that means to us. We’ve had some cake already and now we’re in the reminiscing phase. We caught up with co-founder and Managing Director, Julie Nicholson, about where it all began.
“I came back to the North East after working abroad teaching English and I knew I wanted to help young people in our area. I started to volunteer at my old school, Whickham School and its youth club. I was also working independently with groups of young people as a volunteer helping them do creative projects they were interested in such as DJing, graffiti, skateboarding. One group asked to make a video and that’s what really changed the course of what I was doing.”
“For a while, it was just me and the groups of young people who I supported to get Key Fund funding to do the projects they wanted.
As things grew I started to bring in other professionals like Robin Cowings to do photography. Then I met my soon-to-be, co-founder Olwyn Hocking who’d recently retired from running BBC Newcastle and she offered to help with two projects.”
The organisation, initially called Ultimate Youth before becoming Digital Voice in 2007 continued to develop, offering film-making and photography projects, then stop-frame animation and working with a growing number of freelance artists. We asked Julie if she could pick a favourite project (she found this rather hard!):
“There have been so many! I love to travel and have been able to go to Barcelona and even Colombia with film maker Michael Pentney to give people a voice on important issues in this job, but if I had to choose I’d say the Bully Book. This was a partnership with Save The Children and Byker Primary School, looking at bullying and racism. We pulled together an amazing team of animators such as Alina Trewhitt, Laura Crow, with film making from Olwyn, Lucy Jolly and Andy Ludbrook who we still love working with today.”
So what’s next?
The digital landscape has changed so much in the last fifteen years but some things remain the same. A large percentage of the population are still digitally excluded and this is more likely if you are older or vulnerable or have any sort of additional need. Digital Voice’s mission is to change this and to make sure we’re keeping up with the rapidly developing technology available. To date we’ve worked with over 6000 people on a range of projects, we’re not stopping there! Julie has plenty more projects on the slate:
“Currently we are working on several DigitalMe projects with a wide range of people including: young offenders; children with a parent in prison; disabled transgender young people. We’re also helping people make short, snappy campaign style videos, harnessing the power of Tiktok; one is to warn young people about loan sharks and another is for people with additional needs sharing ideas on how to make cheap healthy meals.”
Pretty busy then? The only thing missing is a film about a wallaby spotted in Chopwell … no, we’ve got that covered too!
We’ll be sharing more stories about the artists we’ve worked with over the last 15 years who are a huge part of the success of Digital Voice.
For further information on our programmes click here.