Reflections from the People’s Newsroom: Steel City Stories
Opus project the People’s Newsroom Initiative have recently wrapped up a pilot series of workshops entitled Steel City Stories, which brought together 14-18 year olds to explore different modes of storytelling, including filmmaking, poetry, storywriting and archiving. We asked Debs Grayson and Tchiyiwe Chihana to share some reflections with us on what they have learned through the process, and what the future of the project could be.
Photo credit: Rachel Rae
At Opus, we think a lot about the future and who gets to create it. We both work on The People's Newsroom, an Opus project that focuses on the role of storytelling in creating the future. We've been developing ideas around what we call ‘story commoning’ – equitable and collective ways of sharing stories that support transitions away from our current extractive economies and towards regenerative ways of living together.
Of course, whose stories are being shared and heard, and how they come into the conversation, is very important. Even the language in the paragraph above speaks to a particular kind of person. We wanted to create a space that felt inviting to a wider set of people, whose dreams for the future also need to be part of our collective story of where we're trying to get to. So we worked with some brilliant artists and facilitators to design a project called Steel City Stories, focused on young people from global majority backgrounds, to test out spaces where young people can tell their 'story of Sheffield'. We ran it as a collaboration with African Voices Platform, the community media company that Tchiyiwe also runs.
So far we’ve been running pilots to see how they land. We ran a day of workshops in February, and a three-day programme over the Easter holidays. 12 young people aged 14 to 18 took part in each – the majority of the February group came back in April, which seemed like a good sign! Neither of us has a lot of expertise in working with young people, so we brought in some brilliant facilitators: Rosa Cisneros, Cheelo, Asma Kabadeh, Ethel Maqeda, Maxine Greaves and Grace Osasu.
The young people did a mix of sessions, learning about filmmaking, poetry, storywriting and archiving. In April, they went on a guided walk to Norfolk Park, taking inspiration from the history of the city and the plants and flowers they gathered in the park. They also appeared on African Voices Platform radio to talk about their experiences.
We’re still in the development stage, and learned a lot from these first sessions. Making spaces for teenagers is a lot of work, but at the same time there's so much to understand about the world from their perspective. We heard how little there is for young people to do that doesn't cost loads of money – their other options seemed to be mainly going to Meadowhall or playing on their phones, so having a different kind of space to be in was valuable. It may just have been our group, but they were surprisingly ‘analogue’ and really enjoyed looking at archive materials, drawing and crafting.
The group was all young women, and mostly from a range of Black backgrounds. For future sessions we'd like to appeal to other communities, perhaps by partnering with Link.fm. Getting boys to come may take some specific outreach or planning – we had some boys register but none actually turned up. It's possible that 'telling stories' is seen as ‘a thing for girls’, so it might need to be communicated differently to appeal. We'd like to work towards a gender balance in future, while recognising that it would change the group dynamic for those who've come to our sessions so far.
We're now looking for funding to run more sessions in 2027. Do get in touch if you think there are ways we could collaborate!
Debs and Tchiyiwe