Everywhere around the world, the lives of children are shaped by vast, menacing forces for which they bear no responsibility – economic inequality, ethnic hostility, the ideology of austerity.
There can certainly be no sustainable solutions to the world’s most pressing problems if we fail to engage today with the generations who will pick up the baton tomorrow. So this week we sought examples of projects that are uniting and emboldening children and young people, be that through dance, music or play.
In Lima, Dan Collyns visited a hip-hop dance school set up by the successful ballet dancer Vania Masías. She was stunned by the raw acrobatic talent of the deprived teenagers she witnessed freestyling on the streets of the Peruvian capital. What happened next was remarkable.
Music is a catalyst for social change in Mostar, as Gillian Dohrn discovered. A school of rock is bringing young people together in the Bosnian city whose famous bridge linking Bosnian Croat and Muslim communities was destroyed 25 years ago.
“You cannot come into a war zone with a guitar and stop the war,” says Orhan Maslo, the school’s director. “But after the war … music can do a lot to reconstruct.”
In England, more than 500 centres for children and young people have been closed since 2010 as a result of government mandated cuts to funding. But local communities are organising to fill the vacuum, as Rachel Obordo discovered in the West Midlands. The Fun Club for the communities of Lichfield and Burntwood was set up by two youth workers made redundant by austerity and offers a safe space for play as well as organising trips and arts and cookery classes for older children. Nearby, locals have also set up support groups for new parents.
What we liked:
We loved reading about the team of women from indigenous communities around the world who competed at the Roller Derby World Cup in Manchester. We were also intrigued by a blogpost by the economist Mariana Mazzucato, who has been assisting Scotland with its plans for a national investment bank, on how “missions” can bring about long-term change. And we were fascinated by a report on deported millennials driving Mexico’s answer to Silicon Valley.
What we heard:
It’s wonderful to learn about these communities taking responsibility for their prosperity. Much better than reading yet another story about a community waiting for a factory to land on its doorstep.
Commenter MaltKelp writing below the line
Where was the upside?
Scotland was the source of much hope this week. In Edinburgh, Kate Lyons reported on the rise of the repairers, who hope to rekindle our knack for fixing rather than binning our damaged possessions. And in Glasgow, Aditya Chakrabortty met the former owners of a successful printing business, who refused to make an easy fortune selling up when their employees jobs could not be guaranteed. Instead, they found a way to hand the business to the workers – and sales soon shot up by 20%. With its echo of Quaker capitalists of the past, is this a blueprint for the future of responsible capitalism?
