AfroReggae Week Two
Posted by Community Blogger on 11th Aug 2010 at 10:40 | Community, AfroReggae | 1 comment
When at 1am, on the night of their arrival at Shrewsbury House, the group of AfroReggae artists all asked for a private conflab in the bedroom, Rachel their chaperone, said “don’t worry they always do this”.
There are brothers and sisters within AfroReggae like Luciano and Junior, which is hardly surprising as the group is like a clan and role models.
Luciano, Junior and Betho
Family values, to us, may smack of a Victorian or moralistic code. We’re beyond this as a society. Social mobility and regeneration are good things aren’t they? For sure, they have split a sense of close-knit support built up over generations of families living in neighbouring streets. AfroReggae are a clan. Can we find family values again and embrace them in a way which gives us a new sense of belonging?
This pack-like behaviour resonates in West Everton which is the most close-knit, almost tribal community I have ever come across. There are frustrations with this and it takes time to be accepted but when my car broke down at Shrewsbury House once and it was a group effort to get it started I felt - this is where I want to live and being late didn’t matter.
Momentarily I found myself thinking - "They’ll change. They are acting in a protectionist way and their fear of being robbed,” which Altair explained as part of the reason for him wanting to sleep upstairs, was irrational.
My family is dispersed across the North of England and the States. I rarely see my cousins. I have lived in eight cities, including central London and Paris, where people who don’t know their neighbours live in box-like apartments. 6.3m people live alone in the UK and I have always instinctively felt this is wrong. Both of my grandmothers spent the last 20 years or 57 years of her life living alone.
“You are responsible for the change you want to see whether you sit behind a desk or work out in communities. Sometimes you need to lick your wounds together in a dark corner, but then you must emerge into the light to be able to look young people directly in the eyes with a positive hope for the future.” Betho, AfroReggae
But I have seen now that the togetherness of AfroReggae is part of the joy and sense of possibility which is embedded in their existence and way of being - a natural way of buoying each other up, so necessary given the context in which they live and the outreach work that they do.
In order to make best use of their time in Liverpool, our approach was to use an efficient management framework of spreading the artists across workshops in as many centres and areas as possible. What this approach didn’t allow for was the strength which AfroReggae draw from and project in working as a group and a more organic and intuitive orientation of the city and where the needs of the young people are.
So now, the group are sticking together to increase the power of their engagement work, by going to centres where community members have raised awareness locally or youth workers have recruited and going to areas where AfroReggae are instinctively engaging.
AfroReggae Artists with young people who performed in Williamson Square on Saturday 7 August as part of the Liverpool Pride Festival
This new strategy embodies the way AfroReggae naturally magnify their individual strengths and talents as a collective force to be reckoned with. It’s something I very much hope rubs off on all of us in the way we interact and care for each other at work and at play. Betho Pacheco was quick to see that people working in Liverpool have felt like victims of political wranglings for many years. His advice, “You are responsible for the change you want to see whether you sit behind a desk or work out in communities. Sometimes you need to lick your wounds together in a dark corner, but then you must emerge into the light to be able to look young people directly in the eyes with a positive hope for the future.”
Join us at the next training session for professionals - Monday 16th August 10am to 1pm in the Everyman Theatre. Email afroreggae@everymanplayhouse.com
Polly
Polly Moseley
Liverpool PCT
Strategic Development & Programme
Liverpool's Year of Health & Wellbeing
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