Session 15 - Writing Letters And Looking At How We Can Improve Our Workshop - 7/3/12

Katy Dawe from Art Against Knives came in to run our session today. We started the session off by filling Katy in on where we are up to with our campaign.

We discussed what we wanted the young people in our workshops going away with:
- How knife crime affects others
- More of an understanding
- Awareness of the consequences of knife crime
- A postcard about our campaign

Katy spoke to us about the campaign, Lives Not Knives.
- She has worked closely with the lady who runs it, Eliza Reberio.
- They have a really well received anti-knife crime campaign that also offers youth mentoring.
- They produced a video that showed what they do and we think this is a really good idea.
- They got big people involved from within the music industry to help drive their campaign forward, which we all agreed was brilliant.



We agreed that short films are a powerful way to sum up a campaign and get the message across. It is a really good idea to showcase and give people an insight into what we do. Lives Not Knives is powerful because it's run by young people which is very similar to our campaign.



Katy mentioned that if you type in the name of our campaign into Google, then it shows up on the first page, which we are all really chuffed about.

Isabel Chapman from Peabody spoke to us about contributing a video and small feature about our campaign for the 99 Percent blog, which is really well known and can be a great way to get our campaign more widely spoken about. We agreed that we wanted to do this as it would benefit the campaign and spread our message to more people.

If we need to get in contact with her, we can email her on isabel.chapman@peabody.org.uk

At this stage we all agree that video footage is a lot more engaging than just images!

We discussed that we need to be on our campaign's Facebook and Twitter accounts a lot more and update the a lot more regularly.

Katy suggested that we can use our ripple effect group activity to take pictures of and put onto our campaign's Facebook. We felt that this would update people but also share other young people's opinions of who knife crime affects both directly and indirectly. This could potentially be really powerful!

We discussed how we can make more people follow us on Twitter as we agreed that the more mentions we get, will push our campaign forward and get us known to others.

We decided that we want to use an incentive to get people in our workshops to follow us on Twitter during our sessions. We will write a letter to Footlocker to see if we can get them to donate us a few pairs of trainers to give away each month to a selected follower. Katy has kindly agreed to give us a Lovebox ticket to get us started.

We worked on another letter to the mayor of London, Boris Johnson. Katy will email and post him a copy of the letter with the poster attached. We have given it more of a clout this time around so that he will help support our campaign.

We watched the Home Office's new video on their anti knife crime campaign. We agreed that it had a lot of impact as knife crime had destroyed the guys life in a way that meant he could barely move and had to be cared for. It was the shocking factor that made this campaign stand out and be heard.



We worked on letters for Footlockers, which Katy will send in for us and for schools about running our workshops, which Rujina will take care of.

Another suggestion was that we could tweet our letter at companies and people who may be able to help promote and be part of our campaign.

We discussed that it is important for us to speak about 'Joint Enterprise' as many young people aren't aware of it still and it is relatively new. By raising awareness of it to young people could reduce the amount of knife crime incidents in and around London.

Katy discussed an issue that has arisen with schools and anti-knife crime projects:
- They don't want to be associated with it
- They have had a high number of knife crime problems in their school

The way that we will approach this is:
- Sell our workshop as that we will be going to all schools
- It isn't just for people who use a knife but also for people who aren't to raise awareness, as it affects everyone in some way, shape or form.

We have a target of contacting five secondary schools by our next session.