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12 Community & Events
FEARLESS YOUTH ASSOCIATION FASHION &
MUSIC SHOW
By Angela Wathoni & Esther Muthoni
Our
Summer
Community Fashion
Show event held
on the 25th of Aug
2018,
the
event
was a joint venture
between
Fearless
Youth
Association
(FYA), students of
Nottingham
Trent
University,
Maasai
Cricket
Warriors,
Mojatu Foundation
and Police and crime
Commissioner
of
Nottingham
and
Nottinghamshire. The
aim of the Fashion
show as should be,
were to engage
refugees and asylum seekers in the planning, organising
and implementing. This one-day event entailed a diversity
fashion show by bringing together diverse communities
to celebrate and showcase their rich diversity while
celebrating friendship and life in Nottingham. The
aim of the FYA project was to improve relationships
among young people from different ethnic and faith
backgrounds around Nottingham. It also supported
them in being active and visible in bringing groups and
communities together, be creative, discuss issues and
organise and implement events and activities, including
online engagement. We have confirmed promises from
Nottingham City Council’s community cohesion team and
community engagement teams, Nottinghamshire Police
and various local councilors and community leaders.
FYA also focuses on new arrivals and local groups from
deprived areas and who often live in council properties.
As with our previous events and work, Fearless Youth
Association will build on partnerships with local
organisations to make young people feel safer, proactive,
capable of making a difference and standing up for their
views while tackling negative and extremist views and
attitudes. Our partners also stated that they will continue
working with us and will have hands on engagement in
this project. Empowering the young people to take up
roles in active lifestyles, training to gain confidence and
knowledge in decision making and helping them become
integral part of their neighbourhoods will help improve
their local neighbourhoods and create positive attitudes
and views of living within Nottingham. It will reduce a
sense of “abandoned youths” which is a view some of us
felt when we set up this group. Overall, this will have a
long-term impact in the activities and role of the young
people involved in the project and the community as a
whole seeing what we as youths can do.
To make the event relevant and useful to the community
we sought the opinions of a group of local community
groups to see what services and activities they would like
to know more about. The vast majority of answers we got
was people felt that they would benefit from engaging
different communities/groups that would normally not
been included in activities with other groups. Most people
also wanted to build friendships, trust and links among
young people with similar interests irrespective of their
differences in background, faith and attitudes, a thing
that would otherwise not happen left to themselves.
This will make the local area and neighborhood safer and
friendlier by making the young people more active and
focused while making the project sustainable through
skills attained, music and online contents produced
and growth in interests and investment in music and
entertainment.
We chose to hold the event at Marcus Garvey in order
to inclusivity of the students as well as the communities’
members, also it was a central location to everyone who
participated in the event. As a whole seeing what us
youths can do word got around about the event, many
other organisations approached us to ask for a stall until
eventually we had to be selective with who we invited
and had to turn several organisations away as there
was not space to accommodate all. When we initially
started planning the event, we offered stalls to around 13
different organisations that we felt met the needs of the
community.