Crisis Café get £250k for exciting cross-border Creative Project

The Crisis Café in Newry is super excited about their latest cross-border project, which will see them partner with Boomerang Centre and Youth Café in Drogheda to deliver a €250,000 youth-led creative venture.

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'Release: the Letter I Would Never Send' was awarded funding through the Creative Youth Nurture Fund: Shared Island strand, funded by the Government’s Shared Island Initiative.

The project will engage young people aged 11–24, with a particular focus on those who are often underrepresented or face barriers to participation, including LGBTQIA+ young people, neurodivergent young people, and those experiencing mental health challenges, social isolation or disadvantage. At its heart, the project recognises that every young person has a story to tell and deserves a safe space in which to express it.

There'll be exchange visits with young people from both organisations taking part in a series of creative workshops designed to explore identity, belonging, emotions and shared experiences. Using creative writing, poetry, papermaking, ceramics and other artistic mediums, they will be encouraged to reflect on the concept of 'the letter they would never send' the words, thoughts and feelings they may have never felt able to express.

A creative writer/ poet and a paper making artist will help the young people create their letters. 

Explaining what happens next Louise Quinn, Co-founder of Crisis Café said: "Some who don't want to save their letter to be part of the final exhibition have an opportunity to either shred it and make papier-mâché type sculptures, or they will work with a ceramic artist and can wedge their letters into the ceramic form. At the very end we will have a final installation that will be made up of some letters, parts of letters, ceramics, papier-mâché with all of that to come together on both sides of the border.

"There'll be workshops getting young people's thoughts about living in Newry and surrounding areas and Drogheda,  the things that are important to them, what they feel their areas offer to them, what it doesn't offer, what they would like to see here, issues that are important and pertinent to young people, whether it's around lifestyle or mental health or friendship, schools and issues that impact upon them, and to draw all that out through creative sessions to really look at the differences and similarities across the border. It's an opportunity for connection through those creative sessions and the exchange visits."

The core business of Crisis Café is to find ways of removing barriers for young people to be able to talk and share how they're feeling. The project aims to improve emotional wellbeing, build confidence and strengthen social connections while increasing young people’s opportunities to engage in meaningful creative and civic participation. It will also create opportunities for cross-border friendships and dialogue.

Quinn said: "We see here at Crisis Cafe every day of the week, young people really struggling with their mental health. We do offer one to one support, but we see the benefits of what young people get from the creative sessions that we do here. Our creative sessions are run by Grainne and I, who are social workers, or our peer volunteers, young people who have come through the café themselves. None of us are artists, but we can see the benefit of even just sitting down with clay or markers and paint and things like that, and how that does help young people to release how they are feeling and the benefits of that."

Artist/ Co-ordinator Mark Revels will be working with Creative Writer Wendy Sinnamon; Visual Artist Deborah Malcolmson and Ceramicist Ciara Campbell in shaping the letters into different forms.

Some of the participants may not want to keep their words in letter form and there will be the option to shred it and recreate something completely different. Revels adds: "But those words will still remain within that sculpture, they're just in a different form" The letters may also be packed into a ceramic envelope or sculpture. "When they burn that, when it gets fired in the kiln, that totally disappears, but it's always there within the remnants."

A key output of the project will be the co-creation of a collaborative artistic piece developed by the young people themselves. Through papier-mâché and ceramic sculpture, participants will create a final artwork that represents their shared learning, collective voices and vision for connection across borders. This creative legacy piece will celebrate the power of youth participation and provide a tangible expression of what young people want adults, communities and decision-makers to hear.

Different elements may come together into a large installation or it may adapt into smaller pieces to tour schools or youth clubs. Revels adds: "I've got a wealth of imagery and experience to show them what a large scale installation can look like, and where it can go, and then you can scale it right back down to micro exhibitions. We don't want to stamp anything too rigid on how that might look because we will let them develop it as they go along"

Grainne Graham, Co-founder, Crisis Café added: "What's really good with this project is you will have a researcher working alongside evaluating and drawing out the themes from young people as well. By the end of it, we'll have a final report around young people's thoughts and views on the things that are important to them."

Quinn added: "We're going on a journey with young people and we're going to see where that leads us. When I try to explain to the young people here what it is, I say we don't know what we're going to develop.  I think it's really exciting to see what themes come out from young people  because as adults we can be very quick to to say, these are the issues that are going to be around for young people, but actually when you sit down and they're in those creative spaces it's really interesting to watch actually what themes do start to come through."

Key project stakeholders include the young people participating, Crisis Café and Boomerang Café staff and volunteers, families and carers, local schools and community partners, artists, poets and creative practitioners.

They are hoping to draw in quite a number of young people who haven't been involved with Crisis Café or Boomerang before. Anyone interested in being involved should message the Crisis Café social media pages, or email, or telephone them. Check out www.crisiscafeni.com for all the details.

Support from the Creative Ireland Creative Youth Nurture Fund is instrumental in bringing this vision to life. The funding enables both organisations to provide high-quality creative experiences, specialist facilitation and meaningful youth participation opportunities that are free, accessible and inclusive.

Release the Letter I Would Never Send is more than a creative project. It is an opportunity for young people to find their voice, build lasting connections across the island of Ireland and demonstrate the transformative power of creativity in promoting wellbeing, inclusion and belonging.

Revels is very excited about the project and those who are facilitating it: "A really good facilitator will let the young people lead without them realising that they're leading, and that's when you see some real magic happen. That young person knows how to manipulate something in a different way, and the artist's like, "I didn't even think about that." And then excitement happens, you get this buzz where you start to go down different paths. There is a  main route to go down where we want to end but you will go down cul-de-sacs, work things out, and back up on, and then go off down these little garden paths and that's the exciting bit about the project."

The dynamic of a project not having an exact direction used to petrify him. "I remember somebody say that's the exciting thing about being an artist and starting a project, you can do anything. Whereas I used to have this very - oh I need to know where I'm going, I need a start, middle and end. As time has gone on I'm starting to learn how to play again as an artist, because you get very very blinkered sometimes about how you do things. Sometimes it's about time, it's about funding, people are on tight deadlines and stuff like that, whereas the exciting thing about this is we don't know where this is going, but we know it's going to be a good journey because we've got really really great artists and staff like the coordinators, effectively working with the young people and getting that information, and then working with the creative writers. So there's this great support network, and they all have different sort of skills that the young people will be able to take from effectively."

Graham believes there is so much to learn and take away from the project. "Young people are having the opportunities to have these experiences, creative sessions and experiences they wouldn't have had before. There's so much learning. Artists are all learning from each other on both sides of the border. Us having new connections with the staff in Boomerang in Drogheda, us all learning from your creative sessions."

The Creative Youth Nurture Fund provides funding to individuals and organisations that engage young people in creative projects in which their voice is central.

The project is a Shared Island Initiative, a whole-of-government approach to building a more connected, prosperous and sustainable island of Ireland, grounded in the Good Friday Agreement. It works to strengthen relationships across communities and jurisdictions by enabling broader North–South collaboration and societal connections, inclusive civic dialogue on a shared future and research to deepen the evidence-base on the island as a whole.

See www.crisiscafeni.com