One of our Tribes Hannah inspires us to stay creative…

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Right now, there’s a lot of change happening all around us –  and whether we realise it or not as we go about our day to day, often rushed, lives  – we’re living through a really important time where there’s so much uncertainty about the future around us. With the general election being just over a week away, there are endless campaigns everywhere we go, trying to sway our views to one party or another. As a young person, this can be confusing when there’s so much conflicting media and contradicting comments (and “promises” made) on a regular basis. Ultimately, as young people, we are the ones who any decisions that are made now will affect in the future. It will influence us all in one way or another whatever decision is made, but for the creative industries it’s one which I think there’s a level of uncertainty around – and so it’s vital we keep celebrating creativity through making our own work, regardless.

Creativity is powerful. People often disregard it as anything other than a hobby, or trait, but this is so wrong. Yes, we enjoy it, but there are bigger and more meaningful reasons for why we do what we do if you stop and think about it. Documentary filmmakers for example rarely just want to make a film for the sake of it, writers rarely get their inspiration and motivation purely from their imagination, and actors don’t choose to put themselves in the persona of someone completely different just because it’ll pay the bills. Whichever job role it is, as creatives, we can fundamentally all agree we have one thing in common –we all have something to say. Admittedly, that may not always be the same thing, or be demonstrating the same viewpoint. But that can only be a good thing, as we need to address diversity to improve our work and the impact we have. Creative work has the ability to do something – whether that be educate, inform, or even challenge a perception. That makes it exciting – more than a hobby, it’s a passion for storytelling, for getting voices heard and inspiring reactions from others. Whilst our reasons for making creative work can vary, I think we can all agree that it can be an incredibly powerful skill to have and to choose to continue to promote.

Whilst there are so many positives to being a creative young person, there’s no illusion about the fact that it can often feel like there are several barriers that exist if you want to make a career out of it. Most, if not all creative outlets need money, which if you do manage to gain, more often than not will mean working for free or making other far from ideal sacrifices. In some cases, this means ideas are often lost and not followed through with – I, myself have been in this situation many times, and it’s something that both frustrates and disappoints me, but that I want to change my (and hopefully others!) outlook on.

Even though it might well soon become even harder to gain funding for creative work (ugh, thanks, Brexit!), the more we pursue our ideas and make our own opportunities happen anyway, the more power the creative industries will have to offer in sharing views, and challenging perceptions through using our creativity to our advantage – and as an outlet for change. Why should we see these setbacks as barriers to following through with our ideas, and instead not use them to fuel our motivation for wanting to make them come to life?

Even if this does mean working with little or no budget or making your own work with a group of friends and spending all your own time and money on projects we’re not so sure about ourselves but we know we enjoy, in the bigger picture this could benefit more than ourselves. Through using our creativity to our advantage and continuing to just make stuff, the more work would be out there, the more productive we’d feel, and the bigger chance we’d have to get our voices heard and our ideas shared.

As I was writing this, I had an idea – what if we all decided to share our creative ideas and work- and made something bigger out of it? A shared space, like a growing creative outlet that would capture what it’s like for us as young people, and document our thoughts and experiences at this current time, in one shared space? Using the Your4 Community, or any other social media outlet, it could be a space to share our ideas, to look back on and document what it’s like for us as young people to be faced with such changing times – directly from the people who the changes will be likely to affect the most.

Whether this does or doesn’t happen, I hope you feel a little more inspired to follow through with any creative ideas you’ve been having reading this – after all, even if no one sees your work but you, it will still feel great to have followed through with an idea and I can guarantee you’ll have learnt something through that alone 🙂