Kene Clayton: Empowering youth projects and following your passion
One of the most empowering aspects for communities involved in our Invest Local programme, is the ability to invest in homegrown, grassroots ideas for improving the area in which they live. These are creative concepts, designed to empower the next generation, by embedding a sense of ownership and responsibility for their community resources, as well as nurture increased community resilience and resourcefulness.
It's for this reason, that so many of our Invest Local groups place youth engagement projects high on their list of priorities when setting up their driving change plans. There exists a sound understanding that changes made today must have clear benefit for young people in the future. One Invest Local area that has been able to achieve brilliant things with its youth engagement work is Together for Colwyn Bay (T4CB), whose youth projects range from establishing gaming and youth clubs, to investing in a brand-new creative writing, urban music and sound project – UAM: Underground Artist Movement.
BCT went to speak to Together for Colwyn Bay volunteer and UAM project founder Kene Clayton, to learn about his journey with T4CB and what motivated him to create this incredible project. He begins: “I grew up in Colwyn Bay, this is my hometown, but I moved to Manchester to do admin work and I entered the business world. I did that for seven years and then I hit 30 and thought: ‘I've reached all my goals, I've got a good job, a nice house, I've done it all.’ But in my heart, I recognised that I wasn’t happy really, something was missing. I knew if I carried on down that path, I would be 40, still doing the same thing and not happy. So, I made a point there and then to quit my job and started to pursue youth work.
“I moved back to Colwyn Bay, but I was working in Liverpool then travelling back. Then I got a job in Liverpool and moved there, doing residential youth work. That led to working in music with young people – taking them down to the studio – it was the best bit of their week going to the studio, the whole atmosphere, supporting them with their writing, playing the music back on the bus on the way to the home – that was my best bit of the week as well. So, I then realised that this was what I wanted to do long term.”
After Kene’s youth work in Liverpool, new developments in his personal life brought him back to Colwyn Bay, and this move planted the seed that would eventually grow into UAM. “In 2021 I had my son and I look after him full time, so I moved back to Colwyn Bay to raise him in my hometown. It was then I started to think about how I could use the skills from my residential youth work and also do what I love. To start with I did a lot of volunteer projects really to get back into the community; I met with Scott from Youth Sheds, started doing some voluntary work for him, and that led me to Hannah who runs T4CB’s youth clubs project NXTGEN. So, the first thing was to understand what the community was already doing and work out if there was a space and a need for the idea that I had – the feedback was that there was and that if you build it, they will come.”
After reconnecting with the community in Colwyn Bay through volunteering, and having gathered valuable contacts and knowledge about the community’s needs for youth work in the area, Kene had a chance meeting with T4CB’s Community Arts Development Officer Georgia in 2023, whose belief and passion for Kene’s idea helped to spur him on to making it a reality.
“I met Georgia at Prom Xtra and we spoke about the idea that I had for UAM. She said that T4CB could support it and invited me to their steering group. I attended a few of the meetings, they listened to my ideas and told me to put a pitch in, which I did and they approved it. They’ve provided £15,212 for the cost of equipment and we have found a space in The Community Hub Colwyn Bay to build our studio. We’re going to offer free music studio sessions for under 18s and it will be a safe space where we can nurture and develop their skills, their confidence and do some team building. So, there's a lot more behind the scenes than just making music, it’s also about the camaraderie that goes with it – you see the young people come out of their shells and support each other with their music projects, so it's brilliant and that’s the kind of project I want UAM to be.”
Kene went on to explain that, although having the studio in Colwyn Bay will provide an incredibly valuable resource within the community, UAM will be much more than just the studio, and he is already in the process of realising a much bigger project that could eventually have a national presence.
“Our next phase of the project is to link with the local college. James, who's the head of their music department has invited us to do a pitch and has about ten young people there who would love to access the service. What we want to do is provide a space where they can record outside of college hours where we'll be open for them to book and record in a professional recording setting. There isn't anywhere else here that caters for urban music, so we have found a niche. It also provides an opportunity for budding producers to gain paid work experience; so effectively the studio can sustain itself and support the community by supporting local, homegrown talent.
“There are many different angles to UAM – we have the studio, we have the links with the college, and we've also got external workshops that we do within the education system. Martin Daws is a professional poet who has joined UAM as our Education and Training Director; he's been working for about 25 years in the education system and delivers workshops in schools and colleges. We have found that a lot of practitioners don't have a network, they just deliver solo workshops, and through UAM we want to provide a community network where we can have a range of practitioners available to go out and deliver workshops. Martin will train us all up to a UAM standard and we will then go out and deliver the workshops across Welsh communities.
“In addition to Wales, we're already looking at how it might work in England. I’ve kept in touch with music contacts I made in Manchester and Liverpool, and we’re also talking with people from Birmingham. Many of these are people that we have worked with when they were younger, and now they're professional artists who have said they would love to go out and teach young people in the way that we taught them – so we have a chance to branch this out and it means that UAM has national potential in the long term.
“Another thing we are considering is a topic-based workshop. We’re linked in with other organisations throughout Colwyn Bay, such as Colwyn Bay Young Advocates Network and Youth Cymru, and together we are creating a network of service providers in the Conway area with the aim of meeting up to see what topics are trending at the minute. Are we looking at drugs? Are we dealing with bullying or racism? What we want to do is set up workshops to tackle a specific issue at a time. We will offer this as a free service which local organisations – such as the youth offending team, local housing and family services, mental and physical wellbeing services – can signpost to the young people they work with. We think that focusing on the core issues that these communities are dealing with is a great way of engaging young people in the service when they need it, because while it's rap and it's writing poetry, the topic can be anything. The workshop process is to work with mood boards and word rhyming, and map it out from that; it is so thought-provoking that it has young people engaging with the topic, working through a lot of emotions and learning a lot of life skills for navigating difficult experiences.”
Throughout our discussion, it’s most apparent that Kene is full of passion and drive for UAM. His main motivation is to empower young people, because he and his colleagues believe in the transformative power of harnessing creative skills to help youths grow into their full potential. Additionally, his future plans are all shaped around entrenching a sense of ownership for the younger members of the local community in Colwyn Bay,
“We worked with Ysgol Clewydog last week, for Cultural Awareness Day, and I got to deliver a poem that was very personal to me about growing up as a mixed race person in Colwyn Bay. It was very well-received, and all of the 281 kids we worked with wrote their own poem about how they fit into a box or how they don't fit into a box, and how they conform. We’re now going to take the keywords from their poems and turn them into our own poem and deliver that back to them. But that experience – of delivering that poem and working with children on that kind of project, as well as another workshop where I recently did my first spoken word event for Llandudno Arts Festival – were the first times I'd performed my poetry. I'm a rapper so usually I hide my words in the music; most of the time people don't even really know what I'm saying, they just hear the music and the melody. But being a poet was a vulnerable experience, but it was good, it challenged me. It showed another level that I can reach. So if I can change my skillset and utilise it in a different manner, which I'm doing now, then we can show young people they can do that too.”